Edgar Wallace

“ So complete and inexplicable was the chill that had come to them with the pronouncement of the name of their enemy, and so absolutely did the spectacle of the Woman of Gratz on the verge of tears move them, that they heard then what none had heard before—the ticking of the clock. ”

“ To Falmouth, upon whom had naturally devolved the duty of protecting the Foreign Secretary from harm, Sir Philip was unusually gracious, and incidentally permitted that astute officer to get a glimpse of the terror in which a threatened man lives.
“Do you think there’s any danger, Superintendent?” he asked, not once but a score of times; and the officer, stout defender of an infallible police force, was very reassuring.
“For,” as he argued to himself, “what is the use of frightening a man who is half scared of death already? ”

“ Bartholomew looked up as Starque entered and nodded carelessly.
Starque took his place at the head of the table, and motioned impatiently to the others to be seated. One, whose duty it was, rose from his chair and locked the door. The windows were shuttered, but he inspected the fastenings; then, taking from his pocket two packs of cards, he scattered them in a confused heap upon the table. Every man produced a handful of money and placed it before him. ”

“ Who in Heaven’s name is going to take the slightest notice of what is in the papers!” he said petulantly.
“I am, for one,” replied the calm detective; “newspapers are more often than not led by the public; and it seems to me the idea of running a newspaper in a nutshell is to write so that the public will say, ‘That’s smart—it’s what I’ve said all along.’”
“But the public themselves—have you had an opportunity of gathering their idea?” ”

“ THE RED BEAN
The Inner Council sent out an urgent call to the men who administer the affairs of the Red Hundred.
Starque came, François, the Frenchman, came, Hollom, the Italian, Paul Mirtisky, George Grabe, the American, and Lauder Bartholomew, the ex-captain of Irregular Cavalry, came also. Bartholomew was the best dressed of the men who gathered about the green table in Greek Street, for he had held the King’s commission, which is of itself a sartorial education. ”

“ Starque was an ingenious man and had learnt many things in Russia. Men who gather round a green baize-covered table with locked doors are apt to be dealt with summarily if no adequate excuse for their presence is evident, and it is more satisfactory to be fined a hundred roubles for gambling than to be dragged off at a moment’s notice to an indefinite period of labour in the mines on suspicion of being concerned in a revolutionary plot. ”

“ The story was plain to him now, and he recovered his balance. “The traitor was discovered and we balloted for his life. There was an equal number for death and immunity, and I as president had to give the casting vote. A red bean was for life and a black for death—and I cast my vote for the man’s death.”
He saw the impression his invention had created and elaborated the story. Starque, holding the red bean in his hand, examined it carefully. ”

“ Bartholomew, renegade and adventurer, said it mechanically. It was nothing to him a brave gentleman should die for no other reason than that he had served his master faithfully.
“Marquis de Santo-Strato, private secretary to the Prince of the Escorial,” read Starque.
“Death!” Again the murmured sentence.
One by one, Starque read the names, stopping now and again to emphasize some enormity of the man under review.
“Here is Hendrik Houssmann,” he said, tapping the paper, “of the Berlin Secret Police: an interfering man and a dangerous one. ”

“ The list took half an hour to dispose of.
“There is another matter,” said Starque.
The council moved uneasily, for that other matter was uppermost in every mind.
“By some means we have been betrayed,” the chairman went on, and his voice lacked that confidence which characterized his earlier speech; “there is an organization—an organization of reaction—which has set itself to thwart us. That organization has discovered our identity.” He paused a little.
“This morning I received a letter which named me president of the Inner Council and threatened me.” ”

“ Throughout the offices of the newspapers the same thing was happening. Every cable that arrived, every piece of information that reached the sub-editor’s basket was coloured with the impending tragedy uppermost ii men’s minds. Even the police-court reports contained some allusion to the Four. It was the overnight drunk an disorderly’s justification for his indiscretion.
“The lad has always been honest,” said the boy’s tearful mother; “it’s reading these horrible stories about the Four Foreigners that’s made him turn out like this” ”

“ But here was the Hidden Terror in the Metropolis itself. Why, argued London, with suspicious sidelong glances, every man we rub elbows with may be one of the Four, and we none the wiser. Heavy, black-looking posters stared down from blank walls, and filled the breadth of every police noticeboard.
£1000 REWARD
Whereas, on August 18, at about 4.30 o’clock in the afternoon, an infernal machine was deposited in the Members’ Smoke-Room by some person or persons unknown. ”

“ It was a search for four men whom no person had ever consciously seen, a hunt for a will-o’-the-wisp, a groping in the dark after indefinite shadows.
Detective Superintendent Falmouth, who was a very plain-spoken man (he once brusquely explained to a Royal Personage that he hadn’t got eyes in the back of his head) , told the assistant commissioner exactly what he thought about it.
“You can’t catch men when you haven’t got the slightest idea who or what you’re looking for. For the sake of argument, they might be women for all we know—they might be Chinamen or niggers ”

“ Yet,” his voice sank lower, “yet we are on the eve of the greatest of our achievements, when the oppressors of the people shall be moved at one blow! And we will strike a blow at kingship as shall be remembered in the history of the world aye, when the victories of Caesar and Alexander are forgotten and when the scenes of our acts are overlaid with the dust and debris of a thousand years. But that great day is not yet—first we must remove the lesser men that the blow may fall surer ”

“ That he should figure on the Inner Council of the Red Hundred is remarkable only in so far as it demonstrates how much out of touch with British sentiments and conditions is the average continental politician. For Bartholomew’s secret application to be enrolled a member of the Red Hundred had been received with acclamation and his promotion to the Inner Council had been rapid. ”

“ Sir Philip expressed his approval, and later, when he and the detective drove down to the House in a closed brougham, he understood why cyclists rode before and on either side of the carriage, and why two cabs followed the brougham into Palace Yard. ”

“ They’ve committed crimes in almost every country in the world. They’re not French because they killed a man in Paris, or Yankee because they strangled Judge Anderson.”
“The writing,” said the commissioner, referring to a bunch of letters he held in his hand. ”