This was the point at which Hogben acted, in what seemed all one movement.
Hogben’s right hand swung up the silver-mounted pistol. His left hand whipped the long black cloak off his other arm. As it billowed out, he threw the cloak over Cheviot’s head and into his face.
Making a dart for the door, he saw it was full of policemen. Instantly Hogben charged between Flora and Louise. There was a bursting crash of glass and flimsy wood as he dived, left arm protecting his face, through the lower part of the window.
They heard him hit the ground sideways, and roll. He was up in an instant. Carriage-horses screamed, whinnied, and reared up. But there was no horse for Hogben to take; he and Louise, like Cheviot and Flora, had come there in a carriage.
In the dim light of the gas-lamp, out there at the entrance by the crooked tree, they saw him running hard for Whitehall. Cheviot, who had disentangled himself from the cloak, whipped round to those in the doorway.
“Let every man stand where he is!” he shouted. “This is one prisoner I take myself.”
Running to the window, shielding his own face against glass-edges, he ducked his head out, swung his legs through, and dropped outside. They saw him running hard after Hogben as the latter, at the entrance, turned left and south down Whitehall.
Even as Hogben had acted, Sergeant Buhner flipped off the iron ferrule-cap of the air-gun and swung it up to fire. But he could not find, on the handle of the cane, the knob you pressed to discharge it. As Cheviot disappeared through the window, Buhner flung down the air-gun on the floor.
“Sir,” he said to Colonel Rowan, “I’ve never disobeyed the Superintendent yet. But I’m disobeying him now. And I’ve got—”
His hand went under his coat to the hip-pocket. Then he vanished through the broken window.
Alan Henley still lay face down across the desk. The others stood motionless. Colonel Rowan, Mr. Mayne, Mr. Shirk, Louise, Flora …
They heard no noise except pounding footsteps as Buhner ran hard across the freezing mud. Then even these died away. There was nothing except, very faintly and distantly, the roar of a fighting mob.
“No!” Flora cried. And, after a pause: “No!”
It was like a prevision, a rending of heart and a knowledge of what had happened when it did happen.
Very clearly, and not too far away, they heard a pistol-shot.
You might have counted one, two, three, possibly four; and, with the same clearness, there was another shot.
Afterwards, only silence.
Very slowly Colonel Rowan walked to the shattered window, put his head out, and looked down towards the left.
“Buhner!” he called, though Buhner could not possibly have heard him. “Buhner!”
Far to the south, a red light of fire flickered in the sky.
Colonel Rowan, pale-faced, drew his head back from the window and turned round. In. his scarlet coat, with the buff facings, his shoulders back, he returned to the desk as though in a dream.
They were all in a dream. It went on and on, but it could not last. Mr. Slurk’s hat dropped from his fingers and bounced on the floor. Louise Tremayne had cowered down in the chair. Only Flora stood straight, her chin up and her eyes as though very far away.
Presently they heard footsteps returning. The person who returned, with dragging steps, was Sergeant Bulmer. Nobody urged him; nobody called from the window; nobody dared.
Silently, his face dumpling-dull under his tall hat, he fought his way through the group in the hall as he entered by the front door. He appeared in the doorway, not quite seeming to understand. In his hand, loosely held, was a pistol stamped with the crown and broad-arrow. Its reek hung in their nostrils.
“Yes?” asked Colonel Rowan, clearing his throat. Anger burnt him. “What happened? Where is—where is Superintendent Cheviot?”
Bulmer seemed to ruminate heavily.
“Why, sir,” he said, “the Superintendent’s not back.”
“I know that! Where is he?”
Sergeant Bulmer lifted his head.
“What I meantersay, sir,” he said heavily, “he’s not ever a-coming back. What I meantersay: he’s dead.”
Again the eerie silence coiled round the red and green lamps.
“I see,” muttered Colonel Rowan.
“Hogben,” said Sergeant Bulmer, with a violent effort, “Hogben never meant to run far. Hogben, he stopped and turned. And you know the Superintendent. Went for Hogben, he did, with empty hands. So Hogben up with the pistol and fired in his face.”
Once more Sergeant Bulmer made a violent effort to speak.
“Well,” he said, “I wasn’t far behind. The Superintendent told me never to carry a loaded barker. I swore I wouldn’t. But I had one. I leaned close, so I couldn’t miss. I shot that bastard Hogben between the eyes. And, by God, I’m proud I did.”
Nobody spoke until Mr. Mayne burst out.
“It was Cheviot’s own fault,” he cried, with the wrath of shaken nerves. “‘Fire burn and cauldron bubble!’ He always quoted that, about Margaret Renfrew. He never knew, he never guessed, it applied far more to himself.” Then Mr. Mayne was stricken. “Lady Drayton! I ask your pardon! I never meant …”
His voice trailed off.
Flora, still standing motionless, did not look at him or speak. Only her lips quivered, and began to quiver uncontrollably, as the roar of the mob rose and flames were painted bright in the sky.
EPILOGUE
“O Woman! in Our Hours of Ease—”
WHEN CHEVIOT SAW Hogben turn round, black against the line of fire and struggling distant men, he knew what would happen as soon as light glinted on the silver mounting of the pistol.
He said one word—“Flora!”—as Hogben pulled the trigger.
Something struck him very hard in the head. Or so it seemed, though he saw no fire-flash and heard no report. The single notion left in his brain was that it seemed odd to be falling forward, instead of backwards, if you ran into the impact of a heavy bullet.
Then darkness; nothing more.
How long the darkness lasted he could not tell. There were movements, tremors, ripples at its outer edges. There were sensations through his muscles, in his heart and nerves. A thought crept into his brain and astonished him.
If he were dead, surely, he could not think. And certainly he could not hear.
“Superintendent!” said a voice.
Cheviot raised his head, which ached badly and blurred his sight. He was kneeling, oddly enough, against the door of some cab.
“I couldn’t ’elp it!” a voice was saying over and over, a little distant. “’Ow could I see, in the sanguinary fog, if a car comes smack out o’ them gates and smack across me incarnadined front bumper?”
“That bullet!” Cheviot said. “It must have missed me!”
“What bullet?” asked the voice close in his ear. And he recognized the voice.
He raised his head still further, in the open door of the taxi. All about him was white October mist. His hat was a soft hat, a modern hat. Through the mist gleamed the lights of a pub on the left.
Ahead of him, as he peered round, towered up the tall iron gates—open arches—of the western entrance between Scotland Yard Central and Scotland Yard South. Locked with the front of his taxi loomed another car atop which ran the glowing panel with the black letters POLICE.
“Don’t you see the sign there?” the police-driver was demanding of the taxi-driver. “Don’t you know no public vehicles are allowed beyond this arch?”
“Steady, Mr. Cheviot!” said Sergeant Boyce, who assisted Inspector Hastings in the Night Duty Room at the back of Scotland Yard Central.
“Er—yes.”
“You had a bad knock on the head,” Sergeant Boyce went on. Like all the night-duty force, he was of the uniformed branch. “You had a bad knock on the head when the cars hit and your head struck the door handle. But the skin’s not broken; it’s only a bump. Take my arm and step down.”
Che
viot took his arm and stepped down on a solid pavement.
Time had slipped back; time had slipped into place.
“I didn’t dream it!” Cheviot said.
“No, no, ’course you didn’t. By the way, your wife ’phoned half an hour ago, and said she’d be here to pick you up and take you home in the car. Don’t frighten her! She’s in the office now, and—”
“Didn’t dream it!” said Cheviot.
“Easy, Superintendent!”
“The murder mystery was all solved,” Cheviot went on, still dazed. “All solved in every detail. But the rest of it, in many parts, I’ll never know and I can never learn. I did live in 1829. The past does repeat itself! I never even saw an engraving of the old Houses of Parliament—”
“Now listen, Superintendent.”
“—I never read a description of Joe Manton’s shooting-gallery, or knew its number in Davies Street. Parts of my real life here, and parts I never dreamed, are all confused together. I can never sort them out. If only she … she …”
Light footsteps rapped across the pavement from the Night Duty Room, hurried out under a smaller arch, and a woman’s figure loomed up.
“All right, sir? Here’s your wife.”
Cheviot’s wits cleared. And so, with a kind of inner cry, did his heart.
A woman’s arms went round him as he seized her in turn. Through the mist looked up the same blue eyes. The same mouth, the same fair complexion, the same golden hair under a modern hat, were just as they had seemed before they faded.
“Hello, darling,” said Flora.
Notes for the Curious
1.
FIRST, AS PROOF that the book quoted by Cheviot is not imaginary, permit me to present a photostatic copy of its title-page. It is greatly reduced in size, or it would not have fitted into any book like this. However, it appears on the following page.
It is now necessary to show that the air-gun was well known in 1824, which you see to be the date on the title-page. This is five years before the action of this novel is made to take place.
Further, as demonstration that even then they had an eye for neat, baffling methods of murder, here are the two passages which Cheviot is made to read aloud in the story. First:
pointed him out to me at the Inquest. The air-gun resembled a knotted walking stick, and held no less than sixteen charges. It was let off by merely pressing one of the knots with the finger, and the only noise was a slight whiz, scarcely perceptible to any one who might happen to be on the spot.
And again, for a full description of the weapon used in Fire, Burn!, we have:
was gone to bed; and when he was supposed to be asleep, John Thurtell, disguised in a boat-cloak, was to enter the house by means of Probert’s key of the street door, proceed to Wood’s room, and shoot him through the heart with the air-gun. He was then to place a small pistol that had been discharged, in Wood’s right hand, so that it might appear as if he had shot himself, and he was quietly to leave the house, and sleep in the city. Probert was afterwards to have gone up stairs, and found Wood in this situa-
Indeed, the air-gun existed even earlier. Nearly every biography of King George the Fourth, from the contemporary and scandalous Huish (Memoirs of King George the Fourth, by Robert Huish, 2 vols., London: Thomas Kelly, Paternoster Row, 1831) to Mr. Fulford’s brilliant modern study (George the Fourth, by Roger Fulford, London: Duckworth, 1935), mentions the bullet-hole in the glass of the coach-window. This puts the invention of the weapon at some time early in the nineteenth century.
2. Manners, Customs, Speech
It is hoped that the reader may be tempted further to explore this fascinating age, the late eighteen-twenties to the early eighteen-thirties, which has been so little used in fiction. Disgusted at the cavorting of King George and his roistering brothers during the Regency (1811–1820), society and the middle classes had already turned to a decorum of manners and elegance of speech which at times becomes painfully refined. Much of the quality called Victorianism existed long before Queen Victoria. And yet, beneath the surface of the transition, lurked a turbulence and bawdiness from the opening years of the century.
What were they really like, these people? How did they think, act, speak?
There are glimmers from the well-known official diarists, from John Wilson Croker (The Croker Papers, edited by Louis J. Jennings, 3 vols., London: John Murray, 1884) and from Thomas Creevy (The Creevy Papers, edited by the Rt. Hon. Sir Herbert Maxwell, London: John Murray, 1913).
Croker, during 1829, is so much preoccupied by his new edition of Boswell that he says little. But Creevy snarls outright at the new age.
“Well,” he writes to Miss Orde in March, 1829, “our ‘small and early’ party [i.e., at Lady Sefton’s] was quite as agreeable as ever. But I must be permitted to observe that, considering the rigid virtue of Lady Sefton and the profound darkness in which her daughters of between 30 and 40 have been brought up as to even the existence of vice, the party was as little calculated to protect the delusions of these innocents as any collection to be made in London could well be.”
Tut, tut.
Creevy goes on to call the whole thing “impudent,” and “barefaced.” He rails at the speech and conduct of the guests, including the Princess Esterhazy and young Lord Palmerston.
But we must remember that Creevy, like Lady Sefton and the Princess Esterhazy, was getting on in years; he was forgetting what he once saw and heard. It seems doubtful that any alleged virgin of today, between thirty and forty, would swoon away at what she heard there.
As for what the women really thought, we must try The Journal of Clarissa Trant, 1800–1832 (edited by C. G. Luard, London: John Lane, The Bodley Head Ltd., 1925). Or, on a slightly higher social plane, Three Howard Sisters: Selections from the Writings of Lady Caroline Lascelles, Lady Dover, and Countess Gower, 1825–1833 (edited by the late Maud, Lady Leconfield, and revised and completed by John Gore, London: John Murray, 1955).
Clarissa Trant is a poppet, both in speech and appearance. She is neither a prude nor too coy, and sparkles on for more than three hundred large pages. Born in 1800, she closes her diary with her marriage in 1832. On October 5th, 1829, we are electrified to read:
“I was doomed to spend another nonsensical morning varied by the arrival of Lady T. and her three gawky daughters. As usual, she was scarcely seated before she announced her determination of not allowing her girls to marry until after her death. Tell that to the Marines.”
The italics are Clarissa’s own.
Unfortunately, few fiction-writers would dare make a character in 1829 say, “Tell that to the Marines.” Nobody would believe it. In similar case are such expressions as “lushy,” meaning drunk, though you may find it in Pickwick, or “the gift of the gab,” though George Stephenson, inventor of the famous railway-engine The Rocket, cried out: “Of all the powers of nature, the greatest is the gift of the gab!” (See A. A. W. Ramsay’s Sir Robert Peel, London: Duckworth and Co. Ltd, 1928, page 368.)
Disraeli’s first novel, Vivian Grey (1826), is an important social document because it so well reflects the times, even though in a deliberate distorting mirror of satire. Disraeli afterwards disowned it.
“Books written by boys,” he says contemptuously in his preface to the edition of 1853, “must necessarily be founded on affectation.”
True; his hand had not gained the cunning it afterwards achieved with Coningsby or Lothair. But there may be other reasons for disowning it.
Vivian Grey is full of libellous (and funny) anecdotes of real persons under their real names. For instance, the hero tells how Washington Irving, nicknamed “Sieur Geoffrey” from Geoffrey Crayon, always falls asleep at dinner; on one occasion they pick him up from the table at one great house and set him down at the table of another, where Sieur Geoffrey wakes up fuddled and goes on talking without noticing any difference in the faces about him. But that might have happened to anyone. And, considering Irving’s description of the dinner which ins
pires the ghost-or-horror stories in his own Tales of a Traveler (1824), it is even probable.
Unlike Dickens, who made people act and talk in the way they really did act and talk, much of Vivian Grey is stilted and high-flown. The hero does not use a gun; he “cultivates a Manton.” But we learn, as we learn from the diarists, how his contemporaries loved their delicacies of chicken patties and lobster-salad; how they kept exotic birds, as Lady Cork did in real life; how the women expressed horror at smoking, but did not mind when the men concocted drinks to make any stomach shudder.
Past us marches a monstrous parade of bumbling politicians, of fawning hangers-on, of high-born married harlots. Even then Disraeli was a master of the epigram and the bon mot.
“If you would win a man’s heart,” he advises, “allow him to confute you in argument.” We can see his satiric look as he describes the plight of the young gentleman “whose affairs had become so financially involved that, in order to keep him out of the House of Correction, it was necessary to get him into the House of Commons.”
3. Scotland Yard v. the World of Flash-and-Fraud: Places and Backgrounds
With one exception, I have set every scene of Fire, Burn! in a place which really existed.
We have many source-materials. There is H. B. Wheatley’s London Past and Present, Its History, Associations, and Traditions (3 vols., London: John Murray, 1891). Open it anywhere—to a street, to a square, to a building, what you like—and you walk in the past. There is Hone’s Day Book for 1829, a combined day-to-day history and scrapbook, of which a whole series was published. There is Dearden’s Plan of London and Its Environs, 1828, which, though not so large or with all the coloured plates of Horwood’s Plan of London, 1792–1799, is a map of great value.
Number four Whitehall Place, the original Scotland Yard which even then was known as Scotland Yard, is described—with an illustration—in my friend Mr. Douglas G. Brown’s great book The Rise of Scotland Yard: a History of the Metropolitan Police (London: George C. Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1956), which also contains portraits of Colonel Rowan and Mr. Mayne. There are other histories of the police, notably George Dilnot’s The Story of Scotland Yard (London: Geoffrey Bles Ltd., 1929) and Gilbert Armitage’s History of the Bow Street Runners (London: Wishart, 1932). But Mr. Browne’s book has become and will remain the definitive work, to which I am deeply indebted.
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