“Anyway, we’re very lucky that he’s taken such an interest in us—very lucky. Mr Sedgley would have been very proud. One in the eye for Mr Mathers’s lot—don’t you think?”
* * *
As Josephine hurried to catch the omnibus, she saw Atwood leaning against a lamp-post. When he took off his hat to her and smiled, she had no choice but to stop and say hello to him. “Well,” he said. “Miss Bradman—may I call you Josephine? What did you think?”
“Of what?”
“Bloom. A dull performance, no?”
“Dull?”
“Dull! Between you and me, Bloom doesn’t have a sensitive bone in her body. I can tell. She might just as well have stayed in New York.”
“I thought she was rather interesting.”
“I don’t think I’ll be visiting the old V.V. again. The whole thing’s been rather a bore, and it’s time to move on.”
“Mr Atwood—Lord Atwood—I consider Mrs Sedgley a friend.”
“I’m sorry, Josephine. I’m sorry. Sometimes I forget my manners. Which brings me to the matter of my apology. I don’t make them all that often—but I was rude when we last met. My eagerness got the better of me. And then I was terribly sorry to have to leave in such a hurry. As a matter of fact, I came to Bloom’s little show tonight hoping I might see you again. I meant it when I said that I was impressed by your poems. I should say that the editor of the Theosophist is a, well, an acquaintance of mine, at the least … not to mention old Stead…”
By Stead, she supposed he meant W. T. Stead, editor of Borderland, the fashionable new occult quarterly; he was dangling an offer. He held out his card to her.
“Arthur,” she said.
“Hmm? Oh yes. The young man. A friend of yours?”
“You sent him off to your—your accomplice in Deptford—”
Atwood shrugged. “He struck me as short of money. Was I wrong? I thought he could be put to use. Has he not been happy in Deptford?”
The fact was that she’d hardly seen Arthur in weeks. She was growing accustomed to his absence again—which pained her. Whatever he was doing for Mr Gracewell out in Deptford, it had begun to obsess him. He was released from it only at night and on occasional and unpredictable half-days. He was haggard, exhausted, snappish. Whatever strange telepathy they’d seemed to share was fading now—or perhaps it had never existed at all. Perhaps she’d imagined it; or perhaps she was imagining her current fears. She blamed Gracewell’s work for coming between them. She blamed money. The last time they’d walked out together, they’d quarrelled, fiercely. She’d probed; she’d said his new work worried her. Six pounds a week, he said, that was all he could say. He took offence; God knows what he thought she’d meant to insinuate. She made some little private joke, of the kind that not long ago would have made him laugh, and he took it badly. As if he didn’t have enough in his head, he said, without more little codes and puzzles …
Atwood was staring at her, waiting for a response.
“But what on earth is he doing there?”
“Work. For which he is no doubt well paid. You’d be wasted there, Josephine—I have a better use for your talents.”
She was getting a headache, and starting to lose her temper.
He leaned close. “What colour was it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What colour was it?”
She took him to be referring to the apparition in Mrs Sedgley’s drawing-room. “Red.”
He nodded, as if she’d confirmed something very important. “I would like to extend an invitation to you.”
He offered her his card again, and this time she took it. Then he put his hat back on.
“Sir—what happened tonight? Did you see it too?”
“She uses an electric light, Mrs Bloom.”
“Oh.”
“Well, you didn’t think it was real, did you? Red light, and an accomplice outside to throw stones at the window; and imagination does the rest. Yes? Or am I wrong?”
He whistled.
A cab waited idly on the street corner. The driver and the horse both perked up their heads at Atwood’s whistle, and the cab came round at a slow trot.
“For Miss Bradman,” he told the driver, counting out money. “Take her home—no, I insist—home, or wherever else she wants to go.”
He made to help her up into the cab, and she stiffened. He smiled, held out his hands as if to show that they were empty, and turned and walked off.
The driver watched Josephine with frank curiosity. His horse sniffed the air.
The card bore a Mayfair address. Nothing else.
THE
THIRD
DEGREE
{Perdurabo}
Chapter Seven
Notes on a mystery—begun April 3.
Strictly forbidden, of course, this writing. God forbid that the secrets of Mr Gracewell’s business should fall into the wrong hands. But if I can manage not to leave my journal on an omnibus in a fit of exhaustion, I expect all will be well.
—April 4
Let us begin with Mr Irving. It is to his service that I have been assigned, in Room 13. Christian name unknown. Somewhat menacing aspect—tall, heavy-shouldered, quite bald. Shuffles, heavy-footed. Taciturn. Always there in the morning when the men arrive, and always there at night when we depart. The look of the new schoolmaster, of whom one isn’t quite sure, who might have Done Things when he was a soldier. He is the Master of Rooms 11, 12, and 13. A veteran of the old Engine—of which more later.
His days are spent moving between the rooms of his domain, watching us as we work, as if he were invigilating an examination. From time to time he takes out his chalk and alters the instructions. He distributes the ledgers. He makes whispered reports on the telephone—the only time one sees him speak, presumably to Gracewell himself.
Every room has its own telephone! Extravagant beyond all reason.
—April 8
When I began a week ago, fourteen of the room’s fifty desks were occupied. The other Rooms—there are at least fourteen, not counting all the little store-rooms and cupboards—appear equally half-empty. Or half-full. We are undermanned.
By the middle of the week, our number had climbed to sixteen. Two of the new men brought news to us of Room 8, from which exotic location they had been transferred. “Same bloody thing, Shaw—different boss.” One quit; we are down to fifteen. Some of us were insurance clerks, or stockbroker’s clerks—young men of some education who labour under debts. Some are very poor; it is a miracle some of them can read or write at all; and yet we have writers of poetry, and painters, and we have would-be aesthetes who it seems to me do very little, but aspire to do it beautifully. We have all sorts; but all of us need money.
And in the various rooms there are men of what must surely be representatives of all the races of Man, or at least all that can be found in London. The Work obliterates all distinctions among men. On my left in Room 13 sits Mr Vaz, who I believe hails from the Portuguese province of Goa; I cannot say with certainty, because even he claims not to know his birthplace. Born at sea, as in Stevenson—a sailor. If half of what he says is true, then he has seen a good percentage of the Earth; and though he is no older than me, he claims to have been ship’s steward, cook, navigator, good-luck mascot, fortune-teller, diver, and nurse, at various times and in various far-flung locations. He speaks very good English and he claims to speak half a dozen other languages more or less well. His moustache is long and thin; he is short and thin. Quick to make conversation and a quick hand at the Work, which he says reminds him of his days working at a telegraph office in Mombasa.
To Mr Vaz’s left are five scowling and secretive Liverpudlians: Mr Harriot, who was once a solicitor’s clerk, and then a painter, and now works here; and Mr Morley, who is working on a novel about the grim life of the factory worker, and will tell you about it if you are not careful. On my right is a sandy-haired fellow called Simon, who says he is a medical student. He is sickly most
of the time.
It is hot under electric light and we sweat like men in a foundry.
Rooms 6 and 9 and one or two others are occupied by women, barefoot and bareheaded like us, with whom we are forbidden to fraternise. Also an odd lot. Perhaps even odder.
A long omnibus journey in the dark and cold brings one down by the river at the building’s door by eight—at the latest, for we must be in our desks by half past or the whole great machinery might run wild—and there a mob of men and women remove their shoes and hats under the supervision of Mr Dimmick, who struts and shouts like a sergeant-major. A crush in the hallway as we sort ourselves into our various rooms and desks, where the ledgers and instructions await us. More in due course.
—April 10
The ledgers are thin, and bound with black card. Damnably cheap. What Gracewell spends on telephones and electric light he saves on paper and ink. They appear for the most part identical, except for a tiny row of numbers hidden away on the spine. I suppose these numbers mean something to Mr Irving. Somewhere there must be a ledger of ledgers, and perhaps a ledger of ledgers of ledgers.
Sometimes you might find the same ledger on your desk two days running, but rarely three, and most days the thing is new. At occasional intervals and at the end of the day Mr Irving will collect the work and transmit it upstairs by means of the dumbwaiter hatch in the corridor outside.
It was Vaz who brought the numbers on the spines to my attention. He shares my curiosity. He has been here longer than me.
“Once,” Vaz told me, “when we were idle, I asked to see everyone’s ledgers. The ledger I worked on the day before had ended up with the man at the back of the room—he’s gone now. All the others were different. After that I started keeping count. In my head. I have a good memory.”
“Excellent! I wish I did. And what have you learned?”
“Nothing, Mr Shaw. I can make no sense of it. Yet.”
Idle is what we all call it when the Work stops for any reason; for instance, when Mr Irving shuffles into the room, wipes the board clean, hunches over the telephone for a few minutes, then chalks up new instructions.
—Friday
A half-day! An error in the calculations, transmitted like a disease through all the ledgers, requires a halt to work and Gracewell’s personal attention—God help the fellow responsible!
The Work—one can’t help but think of it that way, as if it were something religious—the Work continues on Saturdays and Sundays. I suppose that all the men have made their accommodations with their various gods. It seems to me that God in His infinite wisdom would understand that the Sabbath comes every week, but six pounds comes but rarely.
—April 15
We are counting something, calculating something, but not money; not insurance, or accounts, or banking—so far as I can tell. Someone is paying Mr Gracewell a very large sum of money to do it, though. Fifteen rooms, each one-third full: more than one hundred men and women. A telephone in each room. Electric light. I am too tired to add all this up, and my head aches terribly. To bed.
—April 16
At the front of the room, printed on a placard above the instructions, is the motto PERDURABO. Latin is not one of Mr Vaz’s many languages, and he was under the impression that it meant something to do with perdition and hell-fire. So was I, at first. But Mr Harriot has a classical education, and informs me that it means I WILL ENDURE TO THE END.
What End?
—April 17
“I will be frank,” Vaz whispered to me. “At first I thought this was a bank or a counting-house. But not for long. Soon I thought perhaps it was something—Mr Shaw, may I say this to you? Something criminal.”
“Well,” I whispered, counting off facts on my fingers. “We have a motley assemblage of young men—women, too—and we have an unmarked building by the river. Money without apparent legitimate purpose. Secrecy, codes, conspiratorial oaths. Dimmick, a thug if ever I heard of one. It doesn’t take a master detective to smell a rat, does it, Mr Vaz?”
“I have said the same things to myself, Mr Shaw. Many times.”
“And Atwood, of course; sinister in his own way, I’ve started to think.”
“Atwood?”
I described Atwood, and Vaz agreed with me that he sounds a bad sort.
“You cannot trust a man who smiles too much,” he said.
“But what sort of crime? It must involve numbers. Falsifying bank accounts? Inflating a bubble? I don’t see how. What would one say to the police? We’ve uncovered a conspiracy to perform unusual mathematics?”
“Ah,” Vaz said; but then Mr Irving clapped to indicate that we should resume the Work.
—Friday
A half-day. Told Josephine: a place at the seaside. Good-bye to London. Clean air, sunshine, the blue sea. Quarrelled—don’t know why. Can hardly think of anything these days but the Work.
—April 22
Simon, the medical student, has coughing fits, a burden to those of us who sit next to him, causing us to lose our train of thought. Mr Irving makes no allowance for distractions. He mutters: discipline yourselves. Simon follows these fits with a nervous and ingratiating smile, as if he expects sympathy; but there’s none to spare. He says he intends to work for Gracewell only long enough to clear up some debts, and that he is not, appearances to the contrary, sickly or dying.
We all have coughing fits, or headaches, or bloody noses. Or shivering, or bouts of lassitude, or moments of creeping unease. Our dreams are troubled.
“Worse things happen at sea,” Vaz says. And certainly, the battle for life may be fought more fiercely elsewhere; yet there is something peculiarly uncomfortable about the Work. Something unnatural about the numbers themselves. I do not know how to describe it.
Mr Vaz himself suffers headaches, and fainting fits, from which he once woke up quite convinced that, through a window that had opened in the ceiling, an unfriendly eye was staring at him.
He does not have a family, and says cheerfully that he never intends to be burdened with one. His ambition is to one day own his own little ship, and have a crew to call him sir, and to trade back and forth across the ocean; in pursuit of this ambition he is willing to endure Gracewell’s Work with less complaint than most. He had already been there for nearly two months when I arrived, and that makes him something of an old hand. Few last that long.
“Before this place,” Vaz once told me, “there was another place. It was lost in the storm. That’s what the real long-service men—longer even than mine—say, but they won’t tell you anything more. They’re not supposed to talk about it.”
I shall record the story of how he came to be working for Gracewell.
“I told this same story,” he said, “to the fellow who used to sit where you sit now.”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know. One morning he didn’t come in. The nightmares, I suppose. But please, you asked to hear my story. I’ll tell you. I’m a sailor. That has always been my profession. I could climb a rope before I could walk. It’ll be my profession again when Mr Gracewell’s lunatic enterprise here collapses. Perhaps they’ll come for him and put him in a hospital for madmen. Perhaps they’ll ship him out to India to govern something. In the meantime I am making more money than I have ever heard tell of in my life.”
The room idled. Mr Irving chalked up new instructions. Simon, the medical student, sat with his head in his hands and moaned.
“I was between services. This was shortly after the storm, which I am sure you know was a bad night for ships. The Viceroy lost her top mast to lightning! Well, that was not such bad luck for me. I was bound in service for another two years to the Viceroy. If the storm had come a few days later I would already have been at sea, far from here; and I suppose I would never have heard of Mr Gracewell.”
“It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good,” I said.
“I was enjoying my freedom in a lodging-house over a shop in Shadwell, where I shared a room with three
or four very good friends. And one morning, as we were playing skittles in the garden, and arguing about money, Mr Dimmick interrupted us. I suppose he climbed the fence; one moment we were alone, the next he was there, leaning on the fence and tapping his stick for our attention.”
He shook his head sadly. “No Englishman had set foot in that garden in years. You can’t be too careful in London these days, Mr Shaw. Get out, I said, whoever you are. Get out. We did not kill your bloody Duke and we do not know who killed him. I mean no offense to the Duke, but there has been trouble of that sort lately. He said, shut up. Tapping his stick on the cobbles—shut—up—like so. Anyway—he said that he was looking for me. He knew my name, Mr Shaw. I said, What do you want, and he said that he had heard it said in the pubs that I could tell fortunes.”
Vaz shook his head. “I said certainly not, because I thought perhaps he was a policeman. But it’s true, I have made a little money here and there telling fortunes. Sailors appreciate a glimpse of the future. I have picked up a trick or two in this port or that, and when I was a boy I could roll my eyes back in my head and speak in strange tongues. I consider it an honest profession, though the law of London disagrees.”
I explained that recent events had caused me to have an open mind on the subject of clairvoyance.
“I said that he should leave, because I was not in the business of telling fortunes. He said that he was a sure hand at fortune-telling himself and so he could tell that soon I would be working for him. I said that I wished him good fortune in his endeavours, and he said what did I mean by that, was that a sort of curse? He said that he supposed that, as a heathen, I probably had all kinds of charms and amulets lying around, and I probably thought I could put the evil eye on a man and was probably accustomed to communicating with devils.”
Vaz shook his head.
“Now, my friends are not the kind of men who take such insults lightly. I thought it was very bad manners myself. So they said some harsh words of their own to Mr Dimmick, and they approached him roughly. Mr Shaw, Dimmick’s stick struck like a snake—I hardly saw it move.”
The Revolutions Page 7
