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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Yellow Snake, or The Black Tenth," Edgar Wallace immerses readers in a thrilling narrative rife with intrigue and crime, set against the backdrop of early 20th-century London. Written in a fast-paced, journalistic style, Wallace expertly balances suspense and action with keen observational detail, allowing readers to vividly visualize the characters and the sinister world they inhabit. Central to the plot is a mysterious crime syndicate, exploring themes of betrayal, decadence, and the shadows that linger behind the glitz of urban life, reflecting the anxieties of a society transitioning into modernity. Edgar Wallace, a former journalist turned prolific writer, crafted this work during a time when crime fiction was gaining popularity. His extensive experiences in journalism not only informed his grasp of character and plot but also imbued his storytelling with a sense of authenticity. Wallace's own encounters with crime and law enforcement inspired his narratives, as did the cultural zeitgeist of a post-Victorian society grappling with class disparity and moral complexity. Readers looking for a gripping tale that combines the elements of mystery and the darker sides of human nature will find "The Yellow Snake, or The Black Tenth" to be an enthralling addition to their literary collection. Wallace's engaging prose and clever plotting make this novel a compelling exploration of crime's allure and the often blurry line between good and evil. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Yellow Snake, or The Black Tenth
Table of Contents
Introduction
Power thrives in secrecy, and the struggle to bring it into the light tests both nerve and conscience. Edgar Wallace’s The Yellow Snake, also known as The Black Tenth, invites readers into a world where rumor, menace, and sudden violence gather around hidden alliances. Without divulging surprises, it is enough to say that the novel pivots on a looming conspiracy and the peril it casts over those who stumble into its path. The result is an atmosphere of escalating risk, where clues and threats arrive with unnerving regularity and where every revelation hints at a still larger design.
A cornerstone figure of popular British crime and adventure fiction, Wallace wrote at the height of the interwar period, and this novel belongs to that landscape. First published in the 1920s, The Yellow Snake fits squarely within the thriller tradition that he helped define, fusing crime intrigue with a taste for sensational momentum. The alternative title, The Black Tenth, underscores its focus on clandestine power and organized menace. Readers encountering it today can situate the book among the author’s prolific body of fast-moving tales, produced for a mass readership captivated by newspaper headlines, serialized drama, and the promise of breathless suspense.
This is a spoiler-safe invitation rather than a plot map: the story orchestrates an encounter with a shadowed network whose reach seems to extend beyond ordinary criminality. A triggering incident draws the attention of investigators and bystanders alike, and the pursuit that follows moves through shifting alliances and perilous encounters. The alternative title signals the presence of a concealed circle whose influence must be traced and tested. Wallace builds tension through the steady accretion of hints and reversals, offering readers the satisfactions of a chase narrative—strategies guessed and countered, traps sprung and evaded—while guarding its larger revelations until the last possible moment.
The experience of reading The Yellow Snake is shaped by Wallace’s trademark velocity. Scenes are tightly framed, dialogue pushes action forward, and turns arrive with the snap of a headline. The prose favors clarity over ornament, keeping attention on what happens next and how it alters the balance of power. Set pieces are staged to be immediately graspable—an attribute that helped Wallace translate so readily to stage and screen, and that also makes his fiction feel cinematic on the page. The mood is tense but not bleak, more breathless than brooding, and consistently attuned to the pleasures of pursuit and surprise.
Beneath its forward drive, the novel wrestles with questions that preoccupied interwar audiences: how fear spreads, how rumor becomes a weapon, and how institutions respond when threats ignore official boundaries. It contemplates the appeal of secret orders and the seductive logic of conspiracy, posing the uneasy question of what ordinary people will risk for safety or advantage. It also mirrors the period’s social hierarchies, placing criminal ambition alongside respectability, and testing the faith readers place in law, money, and reputation. In doing so, it frames suspense not only as a game of wits, but as a contest over narratives—who controls them, and to what end.
Modern readers will find both historical insight and ethical friction here. The novel reflects attitudes of its time, including racial and cultural portrayals that today are recognized as stereotyped and offensive. Approached critically, it becomes a document of how popular thrillers helped shape public fantasies about foreignness, criminality, and power. Approached as genre entertainment, it shows how pace and structure can carry a reader through intricate peril without sacrificing clarity. In either mode, it rewards attention to how fear is constructed, how certainty is manufactured, and how the promise of revelation can both expose and entrench the very anxieties it claims to resolve.
The Yellow Snake offers the quick pulse of classic British thriller fiction while supplying a window onto interwar popular imagination. Readers who enjoy high-stakes pursuit, cunning adversaries, and compact, scene-driven storytelling will find it a bracing example of the form. Those interested in cultural history will also find value in its assumptions and blind spots, which invite discussion about the legacies of empire, media sensationalism, and the politics of fear. Enter expecting movement: questions asked before answers are safe, dangers named before they are understood. Stay for the way Wallace orchestrates momentum—and for what that momentum reveals, and conceals, about power.
Synopsis
Set in early twentieth-century Britain, the novel opens with a quietly unsettling incident that draws an unassuming young Englishman into danger. A cryptic emblem, the yellow snake, appears where it does not belong, paired with rumors of an organization known as the Black Tenth. The symbol seems to shadow a recent death and a tangle of affairs the protagonist barely understands. He follows a modest trail of anomalies, from a misplaced document to a messenger who refuses to give a name. What begins as curiosity quickly hardens into an awareness that the emblem marks a hidden power prepared to enforce obedience.
Warnings arrive before explanations. The protagonist is cautioned by a cautious official and by a worldly acquaintance to leave well enough alone. A polite stranger delivers an offer to withdraw, hinting at consequences if certain papers or properties are not surrendered. The episode establishes the contest: a secretive society seeks control of assets that confer leverage, while the reluctant hero feels morally bound to hold his ground. Small encounters escalate into a pattern of surveillance, veiled threats, and sudden disappearances. Each episode confirms that the yellow snake is not mythic decoration but a calling card of a disciplined, coordinated network.
He turns investigator, travelling through the layered geographies of London and its outskirts, from respectable offices to dim backrooms and the industrial riverfront. A veteran detective, practical rather than flamboyant, joins the effort, anchoring it in procedure rather than bravado. The inquiry depends on routine work: verifying alibis, tracing bank transfers, and comparing fragments of correspondence that hint at code. At a small shop dealing in imported curios, a motif recurs, linking trade, secrecy, and debt. No single clue explains the whole. Instead, the investigation accumulates modest certainties that narrow the field of suspects and clarify the society’s methods.
Opposition clarifies as well. The Black Tenth’s leadership remains unnamed and unseen, operating through intermediaries who conform to an impersonal discipline. Orders pass through layers of couriers and agents who reveal little, even under pressure. The yellow snake emblem appears as a mark left at scenes where compliance has been secured, or where refusal requires correction. An attempted abduction exposes the scale of the network, while a rescue reveals its limits. The conflict becomes a campaign of attrition, with each side probing for advantage. The protagonist learns to anticipate traps, accept calculated risks, and keep his movements deliberately unpredictable.
A young woman, connected to the same contested interests, becomes central to events. Practical, observant, and unfazed by the condescension of those who underestimate her, she refuses to be a mere bystander. Her insights into household routines and personal loyalties open lines of inquiry the formal investigation had overlooked. An alliance forms among the principal characters, each contributing distinct capacities: patience, access, and a willingness to act quickly. Using assumed identities and careful timing, they observe gatherings where the organization tests recruits and shuffles responsibilities. From these glimpses, they piece together the structure that shields the society’s inner circle.
The midstory reveals scale. The conspiracy is not confined to a single crime but operates as a business model, fusing intimidation with lawful-seeming transactions. Contracts, loans, and shipping schedules are manipulated to force cooperation, while private scandals provide leverage against those who hesitate. The Black Tenth signifies a council tier, a select group that decides policy and divides proceeds, while the rank and file know little beyond their tasks. Ledgers and codebooks surface briefly, enough to suggest the breadth of operations without yet exposing the leadership. The protagonists recognize that defeating isolated cells will not dissolve the larger design.
Pressure intensifies. Surveillance becomes mutual, and several confrontations unfold in quick sequence: a night watch along the docks, a misdirection at a suburban rail halt, a tense negotiation in a shuttered townhouse. The adversary applies legal pressure as well as physical menace, exploiting loopholes and ambiguity to delay inquiries. A near-fatal trap underlines the stakes, while an unexpected act of loyalty alters assumptions about who can be trusted. From a single clue, almost overlooked, the investigators build a coherent picture of the next move, though proof remains fragile. The effort shifts from reacting to forcing the pace of events.
The approach to the climax emphasizes planning and restraint. Rather than a reckless raid, the protagonists construct a careful test designed to expose decision-makers while protecting the innocent. The plan relies on timing, limited disclosures, and the placement of witnesses where they can affirm what happens. The young woman accepts a dangerous role to keep the pressure where it belongs, even as the threat to her becomes personal. A meeting is arranged in circumstances the adversary believes favorable. What follows is contained here without specifics: a decisive confrontation, a reversal that turns strength into vulnerability, and a hard-won opening.
The resolution restores ordinary life while acknowledging its fragility. The apparatus of law reclaims responsibility for what remains, separating rumor from fact and treating the conspiracy as a prosecutable enterprise rather than a legend. The yellow snake emblem loses its power as secrecy dissolves, though the memory of its reach lingers. The novel’s through line is pragmatic: coordinated malice thrives on silence and fragmentation, and it falters when patient cooperation replaces fear. Within its period setting and assumptions, the story affirms resourcefulness over bravado and diligence over spectacle, concluding with measured reassurance rather than triumph and leaving futures cautiously open.
Historical Context
Edgar Wallace’s The Yellow Snake, also circulated as The Black Tenth in some editions, is set in the milieu of interwar Britain, primarily in London with narrative horizons extending along imperial trade routes to East and Southeast Asia. Written and published in the mid 1920s, it unfolds amid the city’s clubland, embassies, finance houses, and docklands, places where global commerce and clandestine traffic intersected. The postwar capital, strained by debt, unemployment, and political unrest, provides a tense backdrop for a conspiracy thriller. This setting reflects a metropolis at the center of an overstretched empire, anxious about foreign infiltration, economic vulnerability, and the erosion of Britain’s unquestioned prewar authority.
The Yellow Peril discourse, popular from the 1890s to the 1930s, is a central historical frame for Wallace’s novel. The phrase crystallized in Europe after Kaiser Wilhelm II’s 1895 allegory of Asian menace and intensified following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, which proved an Asian power could defeat a European empire. British newspapers, popular fiction, and cinema amplified fantasies of secret oriental conspiracies threatening the West. Wallace’s antagonist framework, invoking serpentine imagery and a clandestine brotherhood, mirrors that climate. The book dramatizes a putative Asiatic cabal operating in London, reproducing and exploiting contemporary stereotypes to stage fears about geopolitical displacement and the vulnerability of imperial centers.
The long arc of Sino‑Western conflict shaped British imaginaries. The Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860 resulted in the Treaty of Nanjing, the cession of Hong Kong, treaty ports, and extraterritorial courts. The Boxer Uprising of 1899–1901 further hardened attitudes: the Eight‑Nation Alliance relieved the Peking Legations in 1900 and imposed indemnities on the Qing. These events imprinted an assumption of legal exceptionalism and punitive coercion in China. Wallace’s vision of a transnational secret society can be read as a fictional transposition of that history: the novel imagines a residual Chinese power acting within imperial metropoles, a reversal of extraterritorial privilege into covert leverage against Britain.
Chinese political upheavals between 1911 and 1928 form a decisive context. The Xinhai Revolution in 1911 ended the Qing dynasty; the Republic of China was proclaimed in 1912 under Sun Yat‑sen, and the warlord era fragmented authority after 1916. Anti‑imperialist protests intensified: the May Fourth Movement began in 1919, and on 30 May 1925 Shanghai Municipal Police under foreign control fired on demonstrators, igniting citywide strikes. The Canton–Hong Kong strike of 1925–1926 paralyzed British trade in the Pearl River Delta. Simultaneously, the Kuomintang’s Northern Expedition (1926–1928) advanced national unification. Wallace’s plot, with diasporic finances, boycotts, and covert pressure, reflects British anxieties that Chinese political mobilization and commerce could be weaponized against imperial interests and London markets.
Secret societies and organized crime supplied imagery readily adapted to thrillers. Triad traditions such as the Tiandihui and Hongmen had complex political and criminal dimensions across South China and the diaspora. In North America, tong wars between groups like Hip Sing and On Leong flared intermittently from the 1890s to the 1910s; in Shanghai, the Green Gang under Du Yuesheng wielded influence over docks, opium, and labor by the 1920s. In 1927 parts of the Green Gang collaborated with Chiang Kai‑shek during the Shanghai purges. Wallace’s Black Tenth transfigures this landscape into an imagined numerological cabal, projecting fears of disciplined, ethnically coded networks possessing reach from treaty ports into the heart of London.
The global narcotics economy and new drug controls also loom in the background. Britain’s 19th‑century opium entanglements gave way to international regulation with the 1912 Hague Opium Convention, the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act in the United Kingdom, and the 1925 Geneva Opium Convention. Metropolitan myths of Limehouse opium dens, sensationalized by the press, exaggerated the visibility of Chinese‑run vice. Such narratives supplied thrillers with motifs of sedation, dependency, and clandestine transport. Wallace’s use of the metaphorical snake, smuggling routes, and covert warehouses resonates with contemporary campaigns against narcotics and the belief that shadow economies threaded through imperial shipping and dockside communities.
Interwar Britain’s domestic unrest sharpened conspiracy plots. The postwar slump of 1920–1921 and mass unemployment eroded confidence; the General Strike of May 1926 challenged the state’s capacity to maintain order. Fear of subversion intensified after the 1917 Russian Revolution and the 1924 Zinoviev letter scandal, which stoked anxieties about foreign manipulation of British politics. Immigration controls tightened with the Aliens Act 1905 and the Aliens Restriction Act 1919; race riots in 1919 in Liverpool, Cardiff, and Newport exposed volatile xenophobia in port cities. Within this climate, Wallace’s narrative of secret files, blackmail, and a foreign‑led syndicate undermining institutions echoes the era’s fixation on internal enemies and the protective aura of Special Branch and Scotland Yard.
As social and political critique, the book performs an ambivalent function. It exposes, albeit through sensational and often stereotyped figures, the fragility of Britain’s interwar order: a nexus of finance, government secrecy, and imperial commerce easily disrupted by coordinated pressure. By staging elite complicity, diplomatic hesitations, and the permeability of clubland to transnational crime, it suggests systemic vulnerabilities and latent corruption. At the same time, its reliance on Yellow Peril tropes inadvertently critiques public susceptibility to xenophobic panic and press hysteria. The depiction of boycotts, strikes, and diasporic networks foregrounds the era’s contested power relations, where imperial privilege met organized resistance and domestic social fissures.
The Yellow Snake, or The Black Tenth
CHAPTER ONE
There was no house in Siangtan quite like Joe Bray's. For the matter of that, Joe was unique even in China, to which so many unusual personalities have drifted since the days of Marco Polo.
The house was of stone and had been designed by one Pinto Huello[1], a drunken Portuguese architect, who had left Portugal in circumstances discreditable to himself, and had drifted via Canton and Wuchau to this immense and untidy town.
The general theory is that Pinto drew his plans after a night of delirium in a paradise of smoke, and had amended them in remorse. The change of plans came when the building was half erected, so that the portion of 'Northward' which had so strong a resemblance to the porcelain tower, stood for Pinto in his unregenerate mood, and all that had any likeness to a riverside go-down fairly represented the erratic Portuguese in the period of reaction.
Joe was big and many-chinned, a mountain of a man who loved China and gin and his long daydreams. He dreamt of wonderful things, mostly impracticable. It was his joy and delight to feel that from this forgotten corner of the world he could pull levers and turn switches that would produce the most profound changes in the lot of mankind.
A lethargic Haroun al-Raschid, he would have walked in disguise amidst the poor, showering gold upon the deserving. Only he could never find the right kind of poor.
China is a land greatly conducive to dreaming. From where he sat he could glimpse the crowded waters of the Siang-kiang. In the light of the setting sun a streak of purple oil that appeared and disappeared behind the rambling skyline of Siangtan. The rhomboid sails of the sampans that go down to the big lake were bronze and golden in the last red rays, and from this distance the buzzing life of this vast hive of a city was neither apparent nor audible; nor, for the matter of that, smellable.
Not that old Joe Bray objected to the scent which is China's. He knew this vast land from Manchuria to Kwang-si—from Shan-tung to the Kiao-Kio valley where the queer Mongolian folk talk pidgin French. And China was the greater part of the world to him. The sin and the stink of it were the normalities of life. He thought Chinese, would have lived Chinese but for that inexorable partner of his. He had tramped the provinces on foot, fought his way out of more forbidden towns than any man of his years, had been stripped for death in the Yamen of that infamous Fu-chi-ling, sometime governor of Su-kiang, and had been carried in honour in a mandarin's palanquin to the very court of the Daughter of Heaven.
It was all one to Joe Bray, English by birth, American by barefaced claim when America found most favour, for he was a millionaire and more. His house on the little hill where the river turns was a palace. Coal had helped, and copper, and the trading-posts of the syndicate that went up as far as the Amur goldfields had added to the immense reserves which had accumulated with such marvellous rapidity in the past ten years.
Joe could sit and dream, but rarely had his dreams materialized so faithfully as the vision which lolled in a deep deck-chair. Fing-Su was tall for a Chinaman and good-looking by European standards. But for the characteristic slant of his black eyes there was nothing that was typically Chinese about him. He had the petulant mouth and the straight, thin nose of his French mother, the jet-black hair and peculiar pallor of old Shan Hu, that crafty old merchant and adventurer, his father. He wore now a thick padded silk coat and shapeless trousers that ran into his shoes. His hands were respectfully hidden in the loose sleeves of his coat, and when he brought one to daylight to flick the ash from his cigarette, he returned it mechanically, instinctively, to its hiding-place.
Joe Bray signed and sipped at his potion.
"You got everything right, Fing-Su. A country that's got no head has got no feet—it can't move—it's just gotter stand still and go bad! That's China. There's been some big fellers here—the Mings and—and old man Hart and Li Hung."
He sighed again, his knowledge of ancient China and her dynasties was nothing at all.
"Money's nothing unless you use it right[1q]. Look at me, Fing-Su! Neither chick nor child, an' worth millions—millions! My line as they say, is finished—almost."
He rubbed his nose irritably.
"Almost," he repeated, with an air of caution. "If Certain People do what I want 'em to do it won't be—but will Certain People do it? That's the question."
Fing-Su surveyed him with his fathomless eyes.
"One would have imagined that you had but to express a wish for that wish to be fulfilled."
The young Chinaman spoke with that queerly exaggerated drawl which is peculiar to the University of Oxford. Nothing gave Joe Bray greater pleasure than to hear his protégé's voice; the culture in it, the pedantry of each constructed sentence, the unconscious air of superiority of tone and manner, were music to the ears of the dreamer.
Fing-Su was indeed a graduate of Oxford University and a Bachelor of Arts, and Joe had performed this miracle.
"You're an educated man, Fing, and I'm a poor old roughneck without hist'ry, geography or anything. Books don't interest me and never did. The Bible—especially Revelation—that's a book and a half."
He swallowed the remainder of the colourless liquor in his glass and exhaled a deep breath.
"There's one thing, son—them shares I gave you—"
A long and awkward pause. The chair creaked as the big man moved uncomfortably.
"It appears from somethin' He said that I oughtn't to have done it. See what I mean? They're no value—it was one of His ideas that they was ever got out. Not worth a cent 's far as money goes."
"Does He know that I have them?" asked Fing-Su.
Like Joe, he never referred to Clifford Lynne by name, but gave the necessary pronoun a significant value.
"No, He doesn't." said Joe emphatically. "That's the trouble. But he talked about 'em the other night. Said that I mustn't part with one —not one!"
"My revered and honoured father had nine," said Fing-Su, in his silkiest tone, "and now I have twenty-four."
Joe rubbed his unshaven chin. He was in a fret of apprehension.
"I give 'em to you—you've been a good boy, Fing-Su... Latin an' philos'phy an' everything. I'm crazy about education an' naturally I wanted to do somep'n' for you. Great stuff, education." He hesitated, pulling at his lower lip. "I'm not the kind of man who gives a thing and takes it back again. But you know what he is, Fing-Su."
"He hates me," said Fing-Su dispassionately. "Yesterday he called me a yellow snake."
"Did he?" asked Joe dismally.
His tone conveyed his utter helplessness to rectify a distressing state of affairs.
"I'll get round him sooner or later," he said, with a wan effort to appear confident. "I'm artful, Fing-Su—got ideas back of my mind that nobody knows. I gotta scheme now..."
He chuckled at a secret thought, but instantly became sober again.
"... about these shares. I'll give you a couple of thousand for 'em —sterling. Not worth a cent! But I'll give you a couple of thousand."
The Chinaman moved slightly in his chair and presently raised his black eyes to his patron.
"Mr Bray, of what use is money to me?" he asked, almost humbly. "My revered and honoured father left me rich. I am a poor Chinaman with few necessities."
Fing-Su threw away his burnt-out cigarette and rolled another with extraordinary dexterity. Almost before paper and tobacco were in his hands they had become a smoking white cylinder.
"In Shanghai and Canton they say that the Yun Nan Company has more money than the Government has ever seen," he said slowly. "They say that the Lolo people found gold in Liao-Lio valley—"
"We found it," said Joe complacently. "These Lolo couldn't find anything except excuses to burn down Chinese temples."
"But you have the money," insisted Fing-Su. "Idle money—"
"Not idle—gettin' four 'n' half per cent on it," murmured Joe.
Fing-Su smiled.
"Four and a half per cent! And you could get a hundred! Up in Shan-si there is a billion dollars worth of coal—a million times a billion! You can't work it, I know—there is no strong man sitting in the Forbidden City to say 'Do this' and it is done. And if there was, he would have no army. There is an investment for your reserves; a strong man."
"I dessay."
Joe Bray looked round fearfully. He hated Chinese politics—and He hated them worse.
"Fing-Su," he said awkwardly, "that long-faced American consul was up here to tiffin yesterday. He got quite het up about your Joyful Hands —said there was too many 'parlours' in the country anyway. An' the central government's been makin' inquiries. Ho Sing was here last week askin' when you reckoned you would be goin' back to London."
The Chinaman's thin lips curled in a smile.
"They give too great an importance to my little club," he said. "It is purely social—we have no politics. Mr Bray, don't you think that it would be a good idea if Yun Nan reserves were used—?"
"Nothin' doin'!" Joe shook his head violently. "I can't touch 'em anyway. Now about them shares, Fing—"
"They are at my bankers in Shanghai—they shall be returned," said Fing-Su. "I wish our friend liked me. For him I have nothing but respect and admiration. Yellow Snake! That was unkind!"
His palanquin was waiting to carry him back to his house and Joe Bray watched the trotting coolies until a turn of the hill road hid them from view.
At Fing-Su's little house three men were waiting, squatting on their haunches before the door. He dismissed his bearers and beckoned the men into the dark mat-covered room which served him as a study.
"Two hours after sunset, Clifford Lynne" (he gave him his Chinese name) "comes into the city by the Gate of Beneficent Rice. Kill him and every paper that he carries bring to me."
Clifford came to the minute, but through the Mandarin Gate, and the watchers missed him. They reported to their master, but he already knew of Clifford's return and the way by which he came.
"You will have many opportunities," said Fing-Su, Bachelor of Arts. "And perhaps it is well that this thing did not happen whilst I was in the city. Tomorrow I go back to England, and I will bring back Power!"
CHAPTER TWO
It was exactly six months after Fing-Su left for Europe, that the partners of Narth Brothers sat behind locked doors in their boardroom in London, facing an unusual situation. Stephen Narth sat at the head of the table; his big, heavy, white face with its perpetual frown indicated that he was more than usually troubled.
Major Gregory Spedwell, yellow and cadaverous, sat on his right. Major Spedwell with his black, curly hair and his cigarette-stained fingers, had a history that was not entirely military.
Facing him was Ferdinand Leggat, a wholesome John Bull figure, with his healthy-looking face and his side-whiskers, though in truth the wholesomeness of his appearance was not borne out by his general character, for 'John Bull Leggat' had endured many vicissitudes which were not wholly creditable to himself—before he came to the anchor of comparatively respectable harbourage of Narth Brothers Ltd.
There had been a time when the name of Narth was one with which one could conjure in the City of London. Thomas Ammot Narth, the father of the present head of the firm, had conducted a very excellent, though limited, business on the Stock Exchange, and had for his clients some of the noblest houses in England.
His son had inherited his business acumen without his discrimination, and in consequence, whilst he had increased the business of the firm in volume, he had accepted clients of a character which did not find favour with the older supporters of his firm, and when he found himself in court, as he did on one or two occasions, disputing the accuracy of clients' instructions, the older supporters of his house had fallen away, and he was left with a clerk and speculator which offered him the opportunities rather of sporadic coups than the steadiness of income which is the sure foundation of prosperity.
He had eked out the bad times by the flotation of numerous companies. Some of these had been mildly successful, but the majority had pursued an inevitable and exciting course which landed them eventually before that official whose unhappy duty it is to arrange the winding up of companies.
It was in the course of these adventures that Stephen Narth had met Mr Leggat, a Galician oil speculator, who also conducted a theatrical agency and a moneylending business, and was generally to be found on the ground floor of jerry-built flotations.
The business which had brought the three members of the firm at nine o'clock in the morning to their cold and uninviting offices at Minchester House had nothing whatever to do with the ordinary business of the firm. Mr Leggat said as much, being somewhat oracular in his methods.
"Let us have the matter fair and square," he said. "This business of ours is as near to bankruptcy as makes no difference. I say bankruptcy, and for the time being we will let the matter stay right there. What may be revealed at the bankruptcy proceedings doesn't affect Spedwell and doesn't affect me. I haven't speculated with the company's money—neither has Spedwell."
"You knew—" began Narth hotly.
"I knew nothing." Mr Leggat waved him to silence. "The auditors tell us that the sum of fifty thousand pounds is unaccounted for. Somebody has been gambling on 'Change—not me; not Spedwell."
"It was on your advice—"
Again Mr Leggat held up his hand.
"This isn't the moment for recrimination. We're short fifty thousand, more or less. Where and how are we going to raise the money?"
His eyes met Spedwell's, and for an instant of time that saturnine man showed evidence of approval and amusement.
"It is all very well for you fellows to talk," growled Narth, wiping his moist face with a silk handkerchief. "You were all in the oil speculation—both of you!"
Mr Leggat smiled and shrugged his broad shoulders, but made no comment.
"Fifty thousand pounds is a lot of money." Spedwell spoke for the first time.
"An awful lot," agreed his friend, and waited for Mr Narth to speak.
"We didn't come here today to discuss what we already know," said Narth impatiently, "but to find a remedy. How are we going to face the music? That is the question."
"And simply answered, I think," said Mr Leggat, almost jovially. "I for one have no desire to face again—when I say 'again' let me correct myself and say for the first time—the miseries of Wormwood Scrubbs[2]. We have—I should say you have—got to raise the money. There remains only one possibility," said Mr Leggat slowly, and all the time he was speaking his keen eyes did not leave Stephen Narth's face. "You are the nephew or cousin of Mr Joseph Bray, and, as all the world knows, Mr Joseph Bray is rich beyond the dreams of avarice. He is reputedly the wealthiest man in China, and I understand—correct me if I am wrong—that you and your family are in receipt of a yearly stipend—pension—from this gentleman—"
"Two thousand a year," broke in Narth loudly. "That has nothing whatever to do with this business!"
Mr Leggat glanced at the Major and smiled.
"The man who allows you two thousand a year must be approachable on one side or another. To Joseph Bray fifty thousand pounds is that!" He snapped his finger. "My dear Narth, this is the situation. In four months' time, possibly sooner, you will stand your trial at the Old Bailey, unless you can secure the money to lock up the bloodhounds who will soon be on your trail."
"On all our trails," said Narth sullenly. "I'm not going alone —understand that! And you can get out of your head the idea that I can persuade old Joe Bray to send me a cent more. He is as hard as nails and his manager is harder. You don't suppose that I haven't tried him before, do you? I tell you he is impossible."
Mr Leggat looked at Major Spedwell again, and they both sighed and rose as though some signal, invisible to Narth, had been given.
"We will meet the day after tomorrow," said Leggat, "and you had better work the cable to China, because the only alternative to Mr Joseph Bray may be even more unpleasant than penal servitude."
"What do you mean?" demanded Narth, rage in his smouldering eyes.
"I mean," said Mr Leggat, as he lit a cigar with great deliberation, "the assistance of the gentleman named Mr Grahame St Clay."
"And who the devil is Grahame St Clay?" asked the astonished Narth.
Mr Leggat smiled cryptically.
