Part 24 (1/2)

In sheer desperation I groped forward slowly and carefully, my face to the black, slimy wall, feeling it forward with my hands. If I stumbled the force of the torrent would, I knew, take me off my feet and I should most probably meet with an awful death. Cautiously I crept along, how far I cannot tell. Each moment seemed an hour, and each step a mile, until of a sudden the wall ended!

Only the black swiftly-flowing flood lay before me. I put out my hand in the darkness, but only grasped the air.

Next moment, however, I discovered that the sewer took a sudden turn, almost at right angles, and that I had come to the corner. Yes. The wall continued! So I groped on and on, my hands travelling over bricks worn smooth by the action of the cleansing flood.

I hoped to encounter one of those men whom I had often seen descend from the street in high boots and carrying a miner's lamp, but I was, alas!

alone. The very absence of the workmen told me the terrible truth. It was the time for the automatic flus.h.i.+ng!

On I groped in frantic haste, the rats scuttling from my path, the darkness complete; the noise of the black waters deafening. I recollected that as we had driven from the Empire it had commenced to rain, and thus was the torrent accounted for.

Of a sudden, I discerned before me something. What it was I could not distinguish. I crept on, and saw that it was like a small patch of faint grey. Then, approaching nearer, I found that it was a single ray of faint daylight which, penetrating from far above, fell upon the black waters. It was day. I had been in that gruesome place all night.

My heart leapt within me as I went forward to it, finding that above was a round, well-like shaft, which led to the surface, while in the wall were iron footholds.

I gained the bottom, and grasping the small, rusted iron rails commenced a slow and difficult ascent.

Not an instant too soon, however, for ere I had placed my foot upon the first rung of the ladder a noise like thunder sounded from the tunnel, and the black waters rose angrily to meet me, was.h.i.+ng about my legs as I climbed higher up, and filling the sewer to its roof.

For a few moments the water remained at that level, and then the torrent slowly receded to its original height as the flus.h.i.+ng wave rushed on towards the outfall.

A cold perspiration broke out upon me. I saw how I had been within an ace of death, and shuddered as I glanced below.

Then, ascending as quickly as my shattered nerves and swimming head would allow, I found above me a closed grating, through which I could hear the roar of the London traffic above.

I shouted, but could attract no attention.

To push up the iron was impossible, for I saw that it was locked.

A woman pa.s.sed close by, and I shouted to her. She turned and looked in an opposite direction, surprised to see no one. She never suspected anyone being beneath the roadway.

An omnibus rumbled over me, and I saw that it was a green ”Bayswater,”

from which I concluded that I must be beneath Oxford Street.

Again and again I shouted for help, but could attract no notice. My position was far from secure, compelled to cling on to those iron footholds in the brickwork.

At last I saw a newsboy close to me. My shout startled him, but when he discerned my face beneath the bars he came closer, and asked,--

”'Alloa, guv'nor! What's up?”

”I'm a prisoner here,” I explained. ”Go and fetch a policeman.”

”My gum!” exclaimed the urchin in his surprise. ”It's the first time I've ever 'eard of a bloke gettin' locked down the sewer.” And he went off at once to call a constable.

The officer came quickly, and after a brief explanation he sent the lad somewhere to the house of one of the sewermen, I think, for the key.

Meanwhile, a small crowd quickly collected around the grating, and I was subjected to a good deal of good-humoured banter until the man came with the key, and I once again found myself at the surface, a dirty, dishevelled, pitiable-looking object in evening dress. I was in Oxford Street, at the corner of Hart Street, Bloomsbury.

Both constable and sewer-man were curious to know how I got in, whereupon I explained that I had been the victim of a plot in some house, of the exact situation of which I was unaware.