Part 18

“Charles would be brought by two warders to the house on the Sea Road after dark on the following day, the interview was to take place in a room with a single door and single window. One warder was to guard the door on the outside, the other would stand below the window. The whole interview was not to last longer than half an hour.

II

“Next evening after dark steps sounded on the path up to the house with the green verandahs. Madame Duplessis had retired to her room; she had dismissed the servants for the evening, and Armand himself opened the door. One of those little ten-cent whale oil lamps was the only light in the passage, but it was enough for Armand to see the forms of the warders and another form, that of his brother.

“The warders, unlike the Governor, weren’t particular about trifles; they didn’t bother about guarding doors and windows, sure of being able to pot anyone who made an attempt to leave the house, they sat on the fence in the moonlight counting the money Armand had given them, ten napoleons apiece.

“Half an hour passed, during which Madame Duplessis heard voices in argument from the room below, and then she heard the hall door open as Charles went out. Charles shaded his eyes against the moon, saw the warders approaching him from the fence, and walked off with them back to the prison he had come from.

“Then Madame Duplessis, hearing the front door close, came from her room, and found her husband in the passage.

“He seemed overcome by the interview with his brother.

“She asked him had he made plans for Charles’ escape, and he answered: ‘No.’ Then he went on to say that escape was impossible. They had talked the whole thing over and had come to that decision. She stood there in the hall listening to him, wondering dimly what had happened, for only a few hours before he had been full of plans and energy and now this interview seemed to have crushed all the life out of him.

“Then she said: ‘If that is so there is no use in our remaining any longer at Noumea.’ He agreed with her and went off to his room, leaving her there wondering more than ever what could have happened to throw everything out of gear in that way.

“She was a high-spirited woman and she had thought little of the danger of the business; pitying Charles, she did not mind risking her liberty to set him free, and the thought that her husband had funked the business came to her suddenly as she stood there, like a stab in the heart.

“She went off to her room and went to bed, but she could not sleep for thinking, and the more she thought the clearer it seemed to her that her husband brought up to scratch had got cold feet as the Yankees say, and had backed out of the show, leaving Charles to his fate.

“She was more sure next morning, for he kept away from her, had breakfast early and went off into the town shopping. But the shock of her life came to her at dinner time, for when he turned up for the meal, it was plain to be seen he had been drinking more than was good for him—trying to drown the recollections of his own weakness, it seemed to her.

“She had never seen him under the influence before, and she was shocked at the change it made in him. She left the table.

“Afterwards she was sorry that she did that, for it was like the blow of an axe between them. Next morning he would scarcely speak to her, and the day after they were due to leave for France.

“They were due out at midday, and at eleven Duplessis, who had lingered in the town to make some purchases, had not come on board. He did not turn up till half an hour after the time they were due to sail, and when he did it was plain to be seen that all his purchases had been made in cafés.

“He was flushed, and laughing and joking with the boatman who brought him off, and his wife, seeing his condition, went below and left the deck to him—a nice position for a woman on board a yacht like that with all the sailors looking on, to say nothing of the captain and officers. However, there was nothing to be done, and she had to make the best of it, which she did by avoiding her husband as much as she could right from that on, for the chap had gone clean off the handle; it was as if his failure to be man enough to rescue his brother had pulled a linch-pin out of one of his wheels, and the drink which he flew to for consolation finished the business.

“They stopped at Colombo and he went ashore, and they were three days getting him back, and when he came he looked like a sack of meal in the stern sheets of the pinnace. They stopped at Port Said and he got ashore again without any money, but that was nothing, for a chap coming off a yacht like that gets all the tick he wants for anything in Port Said. He was a week there, and was only got away by the captain of the yacht knocking seven bells out of him with his fists, and then handing the carcase to two quartermasters to take on board ship.

“They stopped nowhere else till they reached Marseilles, and there they found Madame Duplessis’ lawyer waiting for them, having been notified by cable from Port Said.

“A doctor was had in and he straightened Armand up with strychnine and bromide, and they brushed his hair and shaved him and stuck him in a chair for a family conference, consisting of Madame Duplessis, the old maiden aunt, Armand and the lawyer.

“Armand had no fight in him; he looked mighty sorry for himself, but offered no explanations or excuses, beyond saying that the drink had got into his head. Madame Duplessis, on the other hand, was out for scalps—Do you wonder? Fancy that voyage all the way back with a husband worse than drunk. When I say worse than drunk, I mean that this chap wasn’t content to take his booze and carry on as a decent man would have done. No, sir. He embroidered on the business without the slightest thought of his wife. An ordinary man full up with liquor and with a wife towing round would have tried to have hidden his condition as far as he could, but this blighter carried on regardless, and, when the whisky was in, wasn’t to hold or bind.

“Of course she recognised that something in his brain had given way, and she took into account that he was plainly trying to drown the recollection of his cowardice in not helping Charles to escape; all the same she was out for scalps and said so.

“She said she would live with him no more, that she had been a fool to marry a man whom she had only known for a few months and of whose family she knew nothing. She said she would give him an allowance of a thousand francs a month if he would sheer off and get out of her sight and never let her see him again.

“He sat listening to all this without a sign of shame, and when she’d finished he flattened her out by calmly asking for fifteen hundred a month instead of a thousand. Never said he was sorry; just asked for a bigger allowance as if he was talking to a business man he was doing a deal with instead of a wife he had injured and outraged. Even the old lawyer was sick, and it takes a lot to sicken a French lawyer. I can tell you that.

“What does she do? She says: ‘I’ll allow you two thousand a month on the condition I never see your face or hear from you again. If you show yourself before me,’ she says, ‘or write to me, I’ll stop the allowance—if you try to move the law to make us live together, I’ll turn all my money into gold coin and throw it in the sea and myself after it, you beast,’ she says.

“And he says: ‘All right, all right, don’t fly away with things,’ he says. ‘Give me my allowance and you’ll never see me again.’

“Then he signs a paper to that effect, and she leaves him at Marseilles and goes back to Paris to take up her life as if she had never been married.

“Back in Paris she felt as if she’d been through a nightmare. You see she’d loved the chap, that was the bother. And the rum part of the thing was she couldn’t unlove him. That’s to say she couldn’t forget him. She couldn’t forget the man he’d been. Seemed to her as if some frightful accident had turned his nature and that it wasn’t altogether his fault, and she guessed that it wasn’t only his funking his duty that had changed him, but that Charles, away out there in New Caledonia, was haunting him.

“Then, after a while, being a rich woman, she managed, unknown to anyone, to get news of what he was doing and how he was carrying on, and what she found out didn’t comfort her any. He was up in Montmartre with another woman and going to pieces fast, what with living all his time in cafés and drinking and so on. She reckoned she wouldn’t be paying his allowance long, and she was right.

“One day an old woman turned up at her house asking her to come at once to where he was living as he was mortally ill and couldn’t hold out more than a few hours.

“She didn’t think twice, but came, taking a cab and being landed in a little old back street at the door of a house that stood between a thieves’ café and a rag shop.

“Up the stairs she went, following the old woman, and into a room where his royal highness was lying with a jug of whisky on the floor beside him and a hectic blush on his cheeks.

“‘I’m dying,’ he says, ‘and I want to tell you something you ought to know. I was sent to New Caledonia,’ he says, ‘for a robbery committed by another man.’

“She thought he was raving, but she says, ‘Go on.’

“‘Armand and I were twins,’ he says, ‘as like as two peas. Armand could do nothing. He stayed in Paris whilst poor Charles, that’s me, went making roads on Noumea. Then you married him.’

“‘But you are Armand,’ she cries, ‘you are my husband, or am I mad?’

“‘Not a bit,’ says he, ‘I’m Charles, his twin brother.’

“Then she recollected how from the first she thought Armand had changed. She sat down on the side of the bed because her limbs were giving, and he goes on.

“‘A year ago, you and him came in a big yacht to Noumea, and the Governor sent me one night to have a talk with him. When we were alone, he told me how his heart had been burning a hole in him for years, how he had married a rich woman—that’s you—and how, when he was happy and rich his heart had burned him worse, so that the doctors not knowing what was wrong with him had ordered him a sea voyage.’ Then Charles goes on to tell how Armand had come to the conclusion that even if he helped Charles to escape, this likeness between them would lead surely to the giving away of the whole show, make trouble among the crew of the yacht, and so on—besides the fact that it was next to impossible for a man to escape from Noumea in the ordinary way, but said Armand, ‘We can change places, and no one will know. Strip and change here and now,’ he says; ‘the guards are outside. I’ll take your place and go to prison, and you’ll be free. I’ve got a scissors here and two snips will make our hair the same, and by good luck we are both clean shaven. You’ve done half your sentence of ten years, and I’ll do the other half,’ he says; ‘the only bargain I’ll make is that you’ll respect my wife and live apart from her, and, after a while, you’ll break the news to her, and, maybe, when I’m free in five years she’ll forgive me.’

“Charles finishes up by excusing himself for the drink, saying if she’d served five years without the chance of a decent wet all that time, she’d maybe have done as he’d done.

“He died an hour after, and there was that woman left with lots to think about. First of all her husband wasn’t the drunkard that had disgraced her, but he was a convict serving his time and serving it wrongfully for a robbery he had not committed and for the sake of his brother.

“The thundering great fact stood up like a shot tower before her that Armand wasn’t the drunkard that had disgraced her in two ports and before a ship’s company, wasn’t the swine that took her allowance and asked for more. That he was a saint, if ever a man was a saint.

“She rushed home, telegraphed to Marseilles and re-commissioned the _Gaudriole_, that was still lying at the wharves. A week later she sailed again for Noumea.

“On the voyage, she plotted and planned. She had determined to save him from the four years or so of the remains of his sentence at all costs and hazards, and when the yacht put in here she had a plan fixed on, but it was kiboshed by the fact that the Governor, as I have said, was changed. However, she took up residence for awhile in the town, people she had known before called on her, and she gave out that her husband was dead.

“You can fancy how a rich widow was run after by all and sundry, myself included, not that I had any idea about her money. I only cared for herself. She knew this as women know such things by instinct, and one day when she was alone with me and I was going to tell her my mind about her, she dropped a bombshell on my head by telling me her whole story, capped by the fact that she had come to help her husband to escape. She asked for my help. I’m a queer chap in some ways. I told her I loved her enough to ruin myself for her by risking everything to give her husband back to her, and between us we worked out a plan that was a pippin.

“It would have freed Armand, only that we found on inquiring about him that he had already escaped—he was dead. Died of fever two months before she came.

“I heard once of a Japanese child that said her doll was alive because she loved it so much, adding that if you loved anything enough it lived. Well, in my experience, if you love anything enough you can make it love you.

“That woman stayed on in Noumea, and I made her love me at last. I married her, you know her, she is my wife. She loves Armand still, as a memory, and for the sake of his memory we live here. It’s as good a place to live in as anywhere else, especially now that they have settled to send no more convicts from France.”

XV—THE ABBOTT MYSTERY

I

A man may live all his days without finding his true vocation, and it is often accident that reveals it to him. Herschel might have ended his days a music master only for chance, and Du Maurier towards the finish of his life found that he had been all his life a novelist without knowing it.

Some years ago my friend John Sargenson found on the beach near Dover an old red satin shoe that had been washed ashore tied to a bundle of papers. I have told the story elsewhere and how, brooding over these things, and by powers of analysis and synthesis rarely linked in one brain, he solved the riddle and brought a murderer to justice.

He didn’t continue in the business. He is a very rich man, and God’s beautiful world offers him better objects of pursuit than the crook and criminal; all the same, a year after the shoe business, accident brought him again in touch with a problem. He took the thing up, followed it to its solution and now he wishes he hadn’t. This is the story as he told me it.

II

I don’t know what it is about travelling that palls on one so much if one is travelling alone, maybe it’s the fact that the perfectly friendly people one meets are dead strangers to one, for all their conversation and close propinquity; a sea and land journey round the world is, in this respect, nothing more than a magnified bus ride, passengers getting in and out, talking together and so forth, but dead to one another once the destination is reached.

It was at Rangoon that this great fact hit me, and incidentally laid the keel of the yarn I promised to tell you. I was suddenly fed up with boats, trains, hotels and strangers, homesick down to the heels of my boots, and wanting some place of my own to hide in; anything, even a shack in the jungle. It was the queerest feeling, and one day when it was gripping me hard, I fell in talk in the hotel bar with an old saltwater chap by name of Boston, who owned boats on the Irawadi and a couple of deep-sea schooners. I told him what was in my mind and he understood. He took me by the arm and led me off down to the river, and pointing out a schooner tied up to the wharf:

“There you are,” said he, “that’s what you want; she’s in ballast and ready for sea. She’s mine. Buy her, or rent her. She’s a hundred and ten tons and nothing can break her, best sea boat in these waters; she’ll take you to Europe safer than the mails, and I’ll get you a skipper and crew inside the week.”

An hour after I had closed, and the _Itang_—that was her name—was mine. I’d found a home. A week later I was off, slipping down the Irawadi with the land breeze into the Gulf of Martaban, bound for Europe?—oh Lord, no! I was homesick no longer; Europe might have gone off the map as far as I was concerned, for the Pacific was calling me.

We sailed south down by the Andamans and through the Straits of Malacca, past Java and Flores, into the Banda Sea, tinkered about amongst the islands and then came through Torres Straits; it was May and the south-east monsoon was blowing—you can’t get through that place when the north-west is on, because of the fogs—then steering north by the Louisiades, we passed the Solomons, touched at several of the Carolines and pushed on till we were about half-way between the Ladrones and Wake Island just under 20° North.

That’s where the happening took place.

One blazing hot morning just as I was turning out of my bunk Mallinson, the skipper, came down to report a boat sighted drifting and derelict away ahead on the port bow.

I came up in my pyjamas, and there she was, sure enough, a ship’s boat, with no sign of life and evidently no dead bodies in her, for she was riding high and dancing to the sea like a walnut-shell, but stuck up in the bow of her there was something like a bit of white board fixed to a spar of some sort.

Through the glass Mallinson made out something on the board that he said was writing. I couldn’t; it looked like black lines to me, but he was right.

We closed up with her, dropped a boat, and I put off with Hogg the mate, the _Itang_ keeping to windward on the off-chance of infection. Mallinson had it in his head that the notice on the board might be a warning of smallpox or plague, or something like that, and he’d once been had badly by picking up a plague boat off the Maldives. But it wasn’t.

The notice had nothing to do with disease or infection, and I’ll give you a hundred guesses as to what some old ship master, maybe dying and half crazy with the loss of his ship, and a secret on his conscience had written up for some passing ship to read.

This was it:

“The heir of William Abbott will be found at 11 Churles Street, Shanghai.”

I don’t mind saying that no sailor man has ever struck anything at sea stranger than that. You must remember where we were: a thousand miles of blue ocean all around and that piece of writing staring us in the face; the affairs of William Abbott and his heir, whoever they might be, contrasted with God’s immensities—an advertisement, almost, you might say, written on that desolation.

It struck me clean between the eyes, it was like meeting a man in a top hat in the middle of the Sahara desert. We closed up with the boat; she was clean swept of everything down to the bailer, no ship’s name on her, and worth maybe a hundred dollars; so we towed her to the _Itang_ and got her on board, notice and all.

It was lashed to a boat-hook, which was lashed to the forward thwart, and we cut it loose and brought it down to the cabin, where we hung it up as a trophy.

After the word “Shanghai” there was the indication of a letter that looked like “L,” faint as if the paint had run out or the fellow who was writing had given up the job, dying maybe, before he could finish it; the board itself was an old piece of white enamelled stuff, torn evidently from some part of a ship’s make-up, the whole thing was roughly done, but the chap, whoever he was, had some education, for there was a punctuation mark after the word “Street.”

We stuck it up on the after bulkhead, and there it hung, giving us food for talk every meal time, and on and off for days. Mallinson said it was the work of some chap who had died and left no will, he was a bit of a sea lawyer and he held that if William Abbott was a sailor and it could be proved he was lost at sea and if some relation of his was to be found at 11 Churles Street, Shanghai, the Law, under the circumstance, would regard the thing as a will.

This seemed to me rubbish, but it gave us something to argue about, and so it went on till the thing dropped from our talk as we raised our latitude, looking in at Los Jardines and then steering for Formosa.

I’d determined to have a look at Japan, so we left Formosa, steering north, and then one day, it was off the Riu Kiu islands, the helm went over and we steered for Shanghai.

The fact of the matter was that beastly board had obsessed me. Though we had ceased talking of it, I hadn’t ceased thinking of it. You know the way a problem gets hold of me. Lying in my bunk at night, I worked that riddle backwards and forwards, and up and down. If William Abbott had written it, what had become of him? Why wasn’t his corpse in the boat? What was the use of writing it? As a legal document, it was useless. The whole thing was a tangle, but one fact stood out, it was a message. Well, to whom? Not to the seagulls or the world at large, but to the first person who should pick it up, and the message was:

“The heir of William Abbott lives at such and such an address.” That was quite plain. Also it was evident that the writer meant that the finder of the message should make use of it by bringing it to or sending it to 11 Churles Street.

Whether some man at the address given could benefit by the message or not was another matter—evidently it was in the mind of the writer that he could.

You see how reasoning had brought me to a point where conscience was awakened. I began to say to myself: “It’s your duty to take that message; here you are a well-to-do idler bound for no port in particular, but just following your own pleasure, you are going to Japan for no earthly reason, just for a whim, Shanghai lies almost on your way and your duty is to stop there,” but I didn’t want to go to Shanghai, I had nothing against the place or the Chinese—I just didn’t want to go; however, that didn’t matter, conscience had taken the wheel and I went.

III

We got to the river before noon one day and picked up a pilot. You don’t know Shanghai? Well, you’re saved the knowledge of the shoals and buoys and lightships and the currents, and the five-mile-long anchorage, to say nothing of the freighters going up and down and the junks out of control. I cursed William Abbott and his heirs before we were berthed, and then, leaving Mallinson in charge, I went ashore to hunt for my man.

I knew Lockhart, the silk man, and found him out, and he made me stop with him at his place all the time I was there, which was only three days.

It’s an interesting place, Shanghai, but the thing that intrigued me most was the fact that there was no Churles Street. Thinking the Johnnie who wrote the notice might have meant Charles Street, I asked for that; there was no such place in the European quarter. The European quarter lies east of the Chinese town. There was no such place in the Chinese town, there was the street of a Thousand Delights and the street of the Seven Dead Dogs, and the street of the Lanterns, and so forth, but they were no use, so, feeling that I was done and shaking the dried mud of Shanghai off my shoes, we put out for Nagasaki.

I sent the notice board flying over the after rail as we dropped the land and dismissed the matter from my mind—from my conscious mind. My subliminal mind had it still in hand, and two days after landing at Nagasaki it asked me this question: “Could that faintly written ‘L’ have been the first letter of the word ‘lost’?”