The Fourth Plague by Edgar Wallace

screen by the fire, in the roomy club chair, the soft thick carpet and the tiny clock that ticked musically over the mantelshelf.
    Tillizini read steadily, the smoke of his cigarette rising in blue coils to the ceiling.
    Suddenly he closed the book with a snap and rose noiselessly.
    He glanced at the clock: it was an idle glance, for he knew the time. He had an eerie sub-consciousness of the hour, be it day or night.
    He walked to one of the three windows and looked out upon the Embankment.
    He saw a crescent of cold lights that stretched towards Blackfriars and was intersected dimly by the bulk of Waterloo Bridge. Across the river was an illuminated sign imploring him to drink somebody’s wine at his own expense; farther down a tall tower of reappearing and vanishing light urged him to the consumption of the only whisky worth while.
    The professor watched without a smile.
    Suddenly a bright splash of light started, and was as suddenly extinguished. Again it flamed—dazzling, white, palpitating light—and again vanished.
    Tillizini stepped back quickly. From a cupboard he took a strange-looking lamp and a coil of wire. He rapidly affixed the plugged end with a connexion in the wall, then he switched out all the lights of the room, and waited. Again the bright light flickered on the opposite bank.
    The professor touched a key at the base of the lamp, and from its conical-shaped projector shot a swift beam of soft blue light.
    Twice he did this, when the light on the other bank began to wink furiously and at a breakneck pace. Long wink, short wink, long, short; without a pause it raced onward with its urgent message.
    As the lamp spoke Tillizini answered it shortly. He read the message as easily as though it were in a printed book, for he knew English as well as he knew his mother tongue, and, moreover, he was an expert in such matters.
    The light on the other shore ceased talking, and Tillizini closed the window at which he had been standing, replaced his projector in his cupboard, and the little table on which it had stood against the wall. Then he drew down the blind and switched on the ceiling light.
    He stood over his desk and wrote rapidly the purport of the message he had received. It was written in small cramped signs which might have been, and probably were, a shorthand which he alone understood. He had scarcely finished when the musical thrill of an electric bell arrested him. He pressed an electric push inserted in the leg of the table, hastily slipped his notebook into a drawer, and turned as the door opened.
    The neatly-dressed manservant ushered in a visitor.
    â€œInspector Crocks,” he announced.
    Crocks was short and stout and jovial. His head was as bald as a billiard ball, his peaked beard was shot with grey; he was a bourgeois of the bourgeois; yet, for all his unpromising appearance, Tillizini had no delusions where this smart policeman was concerned.
    â€œSit down, inspector”—he indicated a chair. “A cigarette?”
    The inspector smiled.
    â€œToo subtle for me,” he said, “I’m a pipe smoker.”
    â€œFill up,” said the professor, with a little smile.
    He did not insult his visitor by offering him tobacco, for he knew that it was an attention which all pipe-smokers resent, calling into question as it does their own discrimination and judgment.
    â€œWell?” he asked, as the other slowly filled his polished briar.
    â€œYour countrymen—if you will pardon me—are not helpful, they are a little—er—”
    â€œThey are liars,” said the young professor calmly. “All men are liars when they are afraid, and I tell you these poor devils are afraid in a way you cannot understand. Not for themselves, but for their children, their wives and their old mothers and fathers.” He rose from the table and walked slowly up and down the room.
    â€œThese men you want are merciless—you don’t know what I mean by