The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (4 page)

The Lord Mayor stepped up, and with a ceremonious bow took the glittering aerator from Lord Placer’s outstretched hands. He held the thing aloft, convinced that it was some rare gift, no doubt incomprehensible to an earthling. He trifled with the crank. As another poof of green shot forth, the crowd broke into applause and began stamping about in glee.

“Londoners!” the Lord Mayor bawled, removing his hat. “This is indeed a momentous occasion.” The crowd applauded heartily at this and, like as not, prompted Newton, who stood bewildered, to offer the Lord Mayor his own curiously wrought box.

A bit perturbed at the interruption but eager, on the other hand, to parley with this hairy beast who, it was apparent, hailed from the stars, old Bastable graciously accepted the gift. It was unlike the first box, and the designs drawn upon the outside, although weird, seemed to be of curiously garbed animals: hippoes with toupees and carrying Gladstone Bags, elephants riding in ridiculously small dog-carts, great toads in clam-shell trousers and Leibnitz caps, and all manner of like things. Seeing no other explanation, the Lord Mayor naturally assumed that such finery might be common on an alien star, and with a flourish of his right arm, as if he were daubing the final colours onto a canvas, he set in to give this second box a crank-up.

The crowd waited, breathless. Even those too far removed from the scene to have a view of it seemed to know from the very condition of the atmosphere that what is generally referred to as “a moment in history” was about to occur. Poor Hornby, his feet aching from a morning of activity, gaped on the inner fringe of the circle of onlookers, as Lord Placer, perhaps the only one among the multitude who dared move, edged away toward the embankment.

There was the ratchet click of a gear and spring being turned tighter and tighter until, with a snap that jarred the silence, the top of the box flew open and a tiny ape, singularly clad in a golden robe and, of all things, a night cap not at all unlike Lord Placer’s, shot skyward, hung bobbing in mid-air, and, in a piping voice called out Herodotus’s cryptic and immortal line: “Fear not, Athenian stranger, because of this marvel!” After uttering the final syllable the ape, as if by magic, popped down into the box, pulling the lid shut after him.

The Lord Mayor stared at Marleybone in frank disbelief, both men awestruck, when Lord Placer, his brass having given out and each new incident compounding his woe, broke for the stairs that led to the causeway below the embankment and sailed like billy-o in the direction of home. About half the mob, eager again for the chase, sallied out in pursuit. When their prey was lost momentarily from view, Jack Owlesby, in a stroke of genius, shouted, “There goes the blighter!” and led the mob around the medical college, thus allowing for Lord Placer’s eventual escape. Marleybone and the Lord Mayor collared Newton, who looked likely to bolt, and were confronted by two out-of-breath constables who reported nothing less than the theft of the spacecraft by a white-coated and bearded fellow in spectacles, ostensibly from the museum, who carried official looking papers. After towing Newton into the brougham, the delegation swept away up Millbank to Horseferry, lapped round behind Westminster Hospital and flew north back across Victoria without realizing that they were chasing phantoms, that they hadn’t an earthly idea as to the identity or the whereabouts of the mysterious thief.

The Lord Mayor pulled his folded speech from his coat pocket and squinted at it through his pince-nez a couple of times, pretty clearly worked up over not having been able to utilize it. Marleybone was in a foul humour, having had his fill of everything that didn’t gurgle when tipped upside down. Newton somehow had gotten hold of the jack-in-the-box and, to the annoyance of his companions, was popping the thing off regularly. It had to have been at the crossing of Great George and Abingdon that a dog-cart containing a tall, gaunt gentleman wearing a Tamerlane beret and with an evident false nose plunged alongside and kept pace with the brougham. To the astonishment of the delegation, Newton (a powerful beast) burst the door from its hinges, leapt out running onto the roadway, and clambered in beside Falsenose, whereupon the dog-cart howled away east toward Lambeth Bridge.

The thing was done in an instant. The alien was gone, the infernal machine was gone, the ship, likewise, had vanished, and by the time the driver of the brougham could fathom the cacophony of alarms from within his coach, turn, and pursue a course toward the river, the dog-cart was nowhere to be seen.

A thorough search of the Victoria Embankment yielded an abandoned, rented dog-cart and a putty nose, but nothing else save, perhaps, for a modicum of relief for all involved. As we all know, the papers milked the crisis for days, but the absence of any tangible evidence took the wind from their sails, and the incident of “The Ape-Box Affair” took its place alongside the other great unexplained mysteries, and was, in the course of time, forgotten.

How Langdon St. Ives (for it was he with the putty nose), his man Hasbro (who masterminded the retrieval of the floating ship), and Newton the orang-outang wended their way homeward is another, by no means slack, story. Suffice it to say that all three and their craft passed out of Lambeth Reach and down the Thames to the sea aboard a hired coal barge, from whence they made a rather amazing journey to the bay of Humber and then overland to Harrogate.

This little account, then, incomplete as it is, clears up some mysteries—mysteries that the principals of the case took some pains, finally, to ignore. But Lord Placer, poor fellow, is dead these three years, Marleybone has retired to the sea-side, and Lord Bastable…well, we are all aware of his amazing disappearance after the so-called “cataleptic transferrence” which followed his post-war sojourn in Lourdes. What became of Jack Owlesby’s pursuit of Olivia I can’t say, nor can I determine whether Keeble hazarded the making of yet another amazing device for his plucky niece, who was the very Gibraltar of her family in the months that followed the tumult.

So this history, I hope, will cause no one embarrassment, and may satisfy the curiosities of those who recall “The Horror in St. James Park.” I apologize if, by the revelation of causes and effects, what was once marvelous and inexplicable slides down a rung or two into the realm of the commonplace; but such explication is the charge of the historian—a charge I hope to have executed with candor.

The Hole in Space

By now you’ve heard of the doings at Chingford-by-the-Tower and of the great orange cataract of flame that the Watford-Enfield scouts saw over Chingford Common on the evening of October 24. You also know that the whole affair blew over in a fortnight, was laughed down as a prank played on the scouts by a gang of local toughs, those same toughs who, during the Baden Powell Jamboree in St. James Park, pitched the four scoutmasters into the duck pond. The burnt tents and rampaging scouts of the Chingford Common incident, however, had a run-in with something other than local bullies: vastly other, I believe I can say with complete truth. Virtually no one knows what actually occurred on that wild night—no one but me, Jack Owlesby, and, I pray, Professor Langdon St. Ives and his man Hasbro. Had I not returned miraculously Sunday last, worn but serviceable, the Watford-Enfield boys would remain known as the Chingford Cuckoos and the Scout’s Rest on Jermyn Street would fold its tent shamefacedly and slink away.

But I haven’t crossed and recrossed a million miles of deep space simply to explain away the Chingford fracas, nor to stand witness for the Enfield toughs, nor to help eradicate the blot that this pall of suspected lunacy has dropped over the Scout’s Rest, although this last task I would undertake cheerfully, for the old Rest has been my succor and my hearth rug, as I believe they say, since the good years of my youth.

My rooms, in fact, are above the Rest there on Jermyn Street, about halfway between Charing Cross Road and the Dunhill shop—the corner of Regent and Jermyn to be precise. It was but eight short weeks ago, if I remember aright, that an oddly uniformed boy nipped round with a telegram of what appeared to be the urgent sort. I had returned to the digs about thirty minutes past from lunch at the Old Shades on Whitehall; you know, off Trafalgar Square: Cornish pasty and mash and a pint of the best a shilling. Can’t be beat, I say. Anyway, here came a fearful pounding on the door and I opened it to find a small stout chap got up in joke clothes, in a Fauntleroy suit and with a sort of greenish wiggy thing atop his head. There was something of the jolly porcine about him, like a pig on holiday. He handed me a note, uttering something made senseless by a foreign accent, and I tipped him twopence for the effort. He tripped off down the stairs looking altogether pleased. The telegram ran as follows:

Jack Owlesby

Jermyn House

#24 Jermyn St.

London

Jack: Project finished. Make haste. 24th of O. absolute necessity. Full moon. Bring woolies and secure copy of Birdlip’s Last Word on Rare Succulents and Tropical Begonias from Dr. Lester, special collections, Brit. Mus.

Professor Langdon St. Ives

The High Road

Chingford-by-the-Tower

Chingford

Another person might have been stupefied by such a telegram, but I wasn’t. I was out and hoofing it up Charing Cross in a nonce to secure, as St. Ives had requested, the Birdlip volume from Dr. Lester. I’ll admit that this part of the instructions was a puzzler. The rest was clear as a lark among peahens, but this plant book threw me. One doesn’t diddle about, however, when Langdon St. Ives calls; one hops to in the manner of the famous rickshaw boy in the fable, and sets about his mission. So, as I say, I set out at a brisk pace and returned with the book in hand—something more of a manuscript than a book—in a matter of an hour. By five o’clock I was packed and rattling away out of King’s Cross Station toward Chingford, the book propped open on my knee and the compartment cheerful with the reek of a merry pipe and the steam from a thermos of coffee and a pair of hotcross buns bought smoking from a car at the station. The illustrated volume was otherworldly, the Latin incomprehensible, and I could only marvel at the foreign climes that produced the strange fauna that peopled the pages of the book.

It was storming outside and the dusk was lit with flashes of lightning that illuminated raindrops the size of goose eggs. The wind was blowing in fits and gusts out of the east, a chill wind off the North Sea, and I was ruminating on the jolly atmosphere of the warm compartment and was congratulating myself for having the upper hand over what have been referred to as the inclemencies of climate, and that in spades, when into the compartment burst a red faced sweating chap with a heavy, fat face and, oddly, with what might be called a family relationship to the man who had delivered the Professor’s telegram—the same swinish features, the small eyes, the stout build.

I was on the brink of suggesting that he had stumbled by accident into the first class car, when what he wanted was either the third class down back, or, more likely, the coal car, when he lunged across and whisked the window down with a twirl of his coarse wrist.

“Quite a night, what?” I said, leading into the whole thing delicately. The wind, however, came howling through at about that time carrying this goose-egg rain upon it like a flood tide, and my words were lost in the deluge. I felt like old Lear, the king in the play who made the crazy speech out on the blasted heath to his knave, poor Tom Foolery, who was wrapped in a winding sheet.

“Quite a filthy night!” I repeated, cupping my hands over my mouth.

He turned and gave me a look, as if I had shouted a madness. Then he squinted along over his nose and said something like, “aaargh,” and pointed out the window toward the east and the lights of Stoke Newington. Anxious not to offend, and supposing that some visual treat was looming out there somewhere, I bent down and thrust my head out into the storm.

In a trice shrivel-face had me by the seat of the trousers and the collar of my mack and I found myself hurtling like the Hesperus toward a blur of rock and gravel along the tracks. The fates, however, have always kept a judicious eye on Jack Owlesby, and apparently they cast a quick vote and decided to play out a bit of slack. I landed tumbling and whooping in a stand of gorse.

I lay still for a moment, taking stock, as they say, and letting the rain, which by now was falling in sheets instead of drops, wash the wildness from my eyes and clear away the muddle. Leave it to being pitched out the window of a moving train to create a muddle. Two things appeared certain as I lay there plucking at gorse spines. The first was that bugs of one sort or another inhabited the bush. The second was that foul play had stuck its beak into the affair and had begun to prod about and stir things up filthily.

This was just the sort of thing, however, that spurs we Owlesbies into action.
Dies Infustus,
I think they call it—the day of unfavorable omen. Such a day might send the average man scurrying, but it simply propels Jack Owlesby deeper into the grim fray. The bugs, once I clamped my eye on them, also played a part in spurring me on, and I, sans book, pipe, tea, and hot-cross buns, wandered away up Forest Road toward Woodford. In Woodford I managed to dry out a bit and to secure a noggin or two of hot punch before hitching a ride with a lorry driver returning that night to Buckhurst Hill. He dropped me at Epping Gate and I trudged the last half mile to Chingford-by-the-Tower on foot. The storm had broken by this time but enough clouds were scudding about to obscure the moon and make the night fearfully black and stark. The wind, although it had lessened considerably down below, was lashing things about with a vengeance upstairs, and the clouds and stars were bobbing and shooting through the night sky in a sort of mad cosmic dance.