Authors: Edgar Wallace
For although popularity or unpopularity was outside his scheme of essentials, yet he had an unswerving faith in the brute instincts of the mob. He was surrounded in the lobby of the House with a crowd of eager men of his party, some quizzical, some anxious, all clamouring for the latest information--all slightly in fear of the acid-tongued Minister.
"Look here, Sir Philip"--it was the stout, tactless member for West Brondesbury--"what is all this we hear about threatenin' letters? Surely you're not goin' to take notice of things of that sort--why, I get two or three every day of my life."
The Minister strode impatiently away from the group, but Tester--the member--caught his arm.
"Look here----"he began.
"Go to the devil," said the Foreign Secretary plainly, and walked quickly to his room.
"Beastly temper that man's got, to be sure," said the honourable member despairingly. "Fact is, old Ramon's in a blue funk. The idea of making a song about threatenin' letters! Why, I get----"
A group of men in the members' smokeroom discussed the question of the Just Four in a perfectly unoriginal way.
"It's too ridiculous for words," said one oracularly. "Here are four men, a mythical four, arrayed against all the forces and established agencies of the most civilised nation on earth."
"Except Germany," interrupted Scott, MP, wisely.
"Oh, leave Germany out of it for goodness' sake," begged the first speaker tartly. "I do wish, Scott, we could discuss a subject in which the superiority of German institutions could not be introduced."
"Impossible," said the cheerful Scott, flinging loose the reins of his hobby horse: "remember that in steel and iron alone the production per head of the employee has increased 43 per cent., that her shipping----"
"Do you think Ramon will withdraw the bill?" asked the senior member for Aldgate East, disentangling his attention from the babble of statistics.
"Ramon? Not he--he'd sooner die."
"It's a most unusual circumstance," said Aldgate East; and three boroughs, a London suburb, and a midland town nodded and 'thought it was'.
"In the old days, when old Bascoe was a young member"--Aldgate East indicated an aged senator bent and white of beard and hair, who was walking painfully toward a seat--"in the old days----"
"Thought old Bascoe had paired?" remarked an irrelevant listener.
"In the old days," continued the member for the East End, "before the Fenian trouble----"
"----talk of civilisation," went on the enthusiastic Scott. "Rheinbaken said last month in the Lower House, 'Germany had reached that point where----' "
"If I were Ramon," resumed Aldgate East profoundly, "I know exactly what I should do. I should go to the police and say 'Look here----' "
A bell rang furiously and continuously, and the members went scampering along the corridor. "Division-- 'vision."
Clause Nine of the Medway Improvement Bill having been satisfactorily settled and the words 'Or as may hereafter be determined' added by a triumphant majority of twenty-four, the faithful Commons returned to the interrupted discussion.
"What I say, and what I've always said about a man in the Cabinet," maintained an important individual, "is that he must, if he is a true statesman, drop all consideration for his own personal feelings."
"Hear!" applauded somebody.
"His own personal feelings," repeated the orator. "He must put his duty to the state before all other--er--considerations. You remember what I said to Barrington the other night when we were talking out the Estimates? I said, 'The right honourable gentleman has not, cannot have, allowed for the strong and almost unanimous desires of the great body of the electorate. The action of a Minister of the Crown must primarily be governed by the intelligent judgment of the great body of the electorate, whose fine, feelings'--no--'whose higher instincts'-- no--that wasn't it--at any rate I made it very clear what the duty of a Minister was," concluded the oracle lamely.
"Now I----" commenced Aldgate East, when an attendant approached with a tray on which lay a greenish-grey envelope.
"Has any gentleman dropped this?" he inquired, and, picking up the letter, the member fumbled for his eyeglasses.
"To the Members of the House of Commons," he read, and looked over his pince-nez at the circle of men about him.
"Company prospectus," said the stout member for West Brondesbury, who had joined the party; "I get hundreds. Only the other day----"
"Too thin for a prospectus," said Aldgate East, weighing the letter in his hand.
"Patent medicine, then," persisted the light of Brondesbury. "I get one every morning--'Don't burn the candle at both ends', and all that sort of rot. Last week a feller sent me----"
"Open it," someone suggested, and the member obeyed. He read a few lines and turned red.
"Well, I'm damned!" he gasped, and read aloud:
Citizens,
We are loath to take this extreme step, knowing that otherwise he is an honest and brave gentleman, and it is with a desire to avoid fulfilling our promise that we ask the members of the Mother of Parliaments to use their every influence to force the withdrawal of this Bill.
Were we common murderers or clumsy anarchists we could with ease wreak a blind and indiscriminate vengeance on the members of this assembly, and in proof thereof, and as an earnest that our threat is no idle one, we beg you to search beneath the table near the recess in this room. There you will find a machine sufficiently charged to destroy the greater portion of this building.
(Signed)
Four Just Men
Postscript.--We have not placed either detonator or fuse in the machine, which may therefore be handled with impunity.
As the reading of the letter proceeded the faces of the listeners grew pallid.
There was something very convincing about the tone of the letter, and instinctively all eyes sought the table near the recess.
Yes, there was something, a square black something, and the crowd of legislators shrank back. For a moment they stood spellbound--and then there was a mad rush for the door.
"Was it a hoax?" asked the Prime Minister anxiously, but the hastily summoned expert from Scotland Yard shook his head.
"Just as the letter described it," he said gravely, "even to the absence of fuses."
"Was it really----"
"Enough to wreck the House, sir," was the reply.
The Premier, with a troubled face, paced the floor of his private room.
He stopped once to look moodily through the window that gave a view of a crowded terrace and a mass of excited politicians gesticulating and evidently all speaking at once.
"Very, very serious--very, very serious," he muttered. Then aloud, "We said so much we might as well continue. Give the newspapers as full an account of this afternoon's happenings as they think necessary--give them the text of the letter." He pushed a button and his secretary entered noiselessly.
"Write to the Commissioner telling him to offer a reward of a thousand pounds for the arrest of the man who left this thing and a free pardon and the reward to any accomplice."
The Secretary withdrew and the Scotland Yard expert waited.
"Have your people found how the machine was introduced?"
"No, sir; the police have all been relieved and been subjected to separate interrogation. They remember seeing no stranger either entering or leaving the House."
The Premier pursed his lips in thought.
"Thank you," he said simply, and the expert withdrew.
On the terrace Aldgate East and the oratorical member divided honours.
"I must have been standing quite close to it," said the latter impressively; " 'pon my word it makes me go cold all over to think about it. You remember, Mellin? I was saying about the duty of the Ministry----"
"I asked the waiter," said the member for Aldgate to an interested circle, "when he brought the letter: 'Where did you find it?'
"On the floor, sir!" he said. "I thought it was a medicine advertisement; I wasn't going to open it, only somebody----"
"It was me," claimed the stout gentleman from Brondesbury proudly; "you remember I was saying----''
"I knew it was somebody," continued Aldgate East graciously. "I opened it and read the first few lines. 'Bless my soul,' I said----"
"You said, 'Well, I'm damned,'" corrected Brondesbury.
"Well, I know it was something very much to the point," admitted Aldgate East. "I read it--and, you'll quite understand, I couldn't grasp its significance, so to speak. Well----"
The three stalls reserved at the Star Music Hall in Oxford Street were occupied one by one. At half past seven prompt came Manfred, dressed quietly; at eight came Poiccart, a fairly prosperous middle-aged gentleman; at half past eight came Gonsalez, asking in perfect English for a programme. He seated himself between the two others.
When pit and gallery were roaring themselves hoarse over a patriotic song, Manfred smilingly turned to Leon, and said :
"I saw it in the evening papers."
Leon nodded quickly.
"There was nearly trouble," he said quietly. "As I went in somebody said, 'I thought Bascoe had paired,' and one of them almost came up to me and spoke."
To say that England was stirred to its depths--to quote more than one leading article on the subject--by the extraordinary occurrence in the House of Commons, would be stating the matter exactly.
The first intimation of the existence of the Four Just Men had been received with pardonable derision, particularly by those newspapers that were behindhand with the first news. Only the
Daily Megaphone
had truly and earnestly recognised how real was the danger which threatened the Minister in charge of the obnoxious Act. Now, however, even the most scornful could not ignore the significance of the communication that had so mysteriously found its way into the very heart of Britain's most jealously guarded institution. The story of the Bomb Outrage filled the pages of every newspaper throughout the country, and the latest daring venture of the Four was placarded the length and breadth of the Isles.
Stories, mostly apocryphal, of the men who were responsible for the newest sensation made their appearance from day to day, and there was no other topic in the mouths of men wherever they met but the strange quartet who seemed to hold the lives of the mighty in the hollows of their hands.
Never since the days of the Fenian outrages had the mind of the public been so filled with apprehension as it was during the two days following the appearance in the Commons of the 'blank bomb', as one journal felicitously described it.
Perhaps in exactly the same kind of apprehension, since there was a general belief, which grew out of the trend of the letters, that the Four menaced none other than one man.
The first intimation of their intentions had excited widespread interest. But the fact that the threat had been launched from a small French town, and that in consequence the danger was very remote, had somehow robbed the threat of some of its force. Such was the vague reasoning of an ungeographical people that did not realise that Dax is no farther from London than Aberdeen.
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 o£ 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.
and whereas there is reason to believe that the person or persons implicated in the disposal of the aforesaid machine are members of an organised body of criminals known as The Four Just Men, against whom warrants have been issued on charges of wilful murder in London, Paris, New York, New Orleans, Seattle (USA), Barcelona, Tomsk, Belgrade, Christiania, Capetown and Caracas.
Now, therefore, the above reward will be paid by his Majesty's Government to any person or persons who shall lay such information as shall lead to the apprehension of any of or the whole of the persons styling themselves The Four Just Men and identical with the band before mentioned.
and, furthermore, a free pardon and the reward will be paid to any member of the band for such information, providing the person laying such information has neither committed nor has been an accessory before or after the act of any of the following murders.
(Signed)
J. B. Calfort, Commissioner of Police.
Here followed a list of the sixteen crimes alleged against the four men.
God Save the King
All day long little knots of people gathered before the broadsheets, digesting the magnificent offer.
It was an unusual hue and cry, differing from those with which Londoners were best acquainted. For there was no appended description of the men wanted; no portraits by which they might be identified, no stereotyped 'when last seen was wearing a dark blue serge suit, cloth cap, check tie', on which the searcher might base his scrutiny of the passer-by.
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; they might be tall or short; they might--why, we don't even know their nationality! 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."