This is no mock humility. I’m as proud a cock as the next. I love to vaunt my knowledge of Holmes, my familiarity with Restoration lyrics (to say nothing of other lyrics not quite so conventional), and above all the curl of my imperial and its deep-brown richness. I shall never forget the kick I applied to the pants of the advertising man who wanted my testimonial for Stabrowne Hair Tint; for every hair of this fine frolicsome foliage, ladies and gentlemen, is natural in its beauty.
The expression on your faces reminds me that the man who types his narrative beforehand is at least likely to stick to his subject. I accept your unspoken rebuke, and will try to check my wanderings. But hell and death, my friends! The letter killeth; and this fantastic case, moreover, has already become such a convolute maze of bypaths that nothing can properly be called irrelevant. It would not in the least amaze me if the fact that my lovely beard is natural in color were to prove the key that unlocked the whole rigmarolypoly mystery. Mrmfk! But I shall try to be straightforward:
I was, I believe, the second of our group to rise this morning. In fact, as I was descending the stairs, I saw Drew Furness leave by the front door and wondered. That was by no means the last time today that I wondered about Drew Furness.
Sounds sinister, doesn’t it? Planting suspense and menace and stuff. But it serves Furness damned well right after he makes out our poor white-maned Federhut as a Nazi spy of positively oogy-boogy proportions.
I shan’t detail my breakfast, except to take this opportunity of congratulating Mrs. Hudson on her streusel cake—a morsel at once so delicate and so substantial as to—Words fail me in my improvisation; I am unable to conclude that sentence either emotionally or grammatically. But accept, my dear Mrs. Hudson, my deepest gratitude. I strongly suspect that the kitchen skill of a good mother has triumphed in you over all the dietetic principles taught by the schools.
It was with no thought either of escaping from the watchfulness of this house or of embarking upon an adventure that I stepped out of the front door after breakfast. I did so only because the first cigar of the day always tastes best in the open air. But I had hardly taken three puffs before the adventure began.
Its beginning was quiet enough—so quiet that a far more sensitive spirit than mine might well have failed to scent adventure in the morning air. A man—a firm, heavy-set, well preserved fellow of roughly my own age—was walking along Romualdo Drive. When he saw me, he turned off the sidewalk and came up the path to the door.
As I said, he looked in good condition, but at the same time lamentably weary. His sturdy arms hung limply at his sides, and his feet dragged heavily along the path. “My friend,” he said, “I observe that you smoke a cigar.”
There is nothing like that first morning cigar for inducing a feeling of general friendliness toward all mankind. “I do,” I said. “Do you care to join me?”
“No,” he replied. “But your cigar gives me hope. A cigarette smoker is only a conventionalist; but the smoker of a pipe or a cigar is a lover of tobacco, and therefore a man of good will.”
I liked the fellow. I felt at once that here was a man after my own heart. “I hope,” I replied, “that you will not judge the extent of my good will by the size of my cigar. What can I do for you?”
He looked down woefully at his feet. “You can lead me,” he said, “to a chair.”
I brought him into this room without further ado and settled him in that luxuriously overlarge armchair now occupied by Herr Federhut. “Light up your pipe,” I said, “and take off your shoes.” These commands broke down the last barriers that might have existed between us. He obeyed gratefully, and for a full minute we simply sat smoking in that friendly and unconstrained silence which the abstainer like Professor Furness can never know.
“I’m lost,” he said at last. “But don’t tell me where I am. I don’t even want to know at the moment. Here I am comfortable, and if I knew which direction my hotel lay in, I should feel obliged to set out for it. So leave me to my ignorance for a bit, and the pleasure of your company.”
My only regret was that the hour was somewhat early to offer a drink, and said as much.
“I warn you,” he replied, “I am quite apt to stay until time ripens to that point, if you can endure me. I dislike imposing myself on a stranger in this manner; but finding a friendly soul here ni the wilds of Hollywood makes my heart rejoice like that of Stanley, or perhaps even appositely, like that of Livingstone.”
“Have you been ashore long?” I ventured.
“It’s two months now since I retired, and already I … I beg your pardon, sir; what do you know of my being on the sea?”
“But you are a ship’s officer, aren’t you? Weren’t you, rather?”
“Captain Fairdale Agar, at your service. But if you’ll pardon my natural curiosity?”
“If you sir,” I answered, “will pardon my ostentation. The deductive diagnosis was simplicity itself. Your carriage, even in your present state of exhaustion, suggested a man of authority in one of the more regimented modes of life. Your dark-brown skin indicates outdoor activity. The scratches on the bowl of your pipe, almost certainly caused by the use of a metal lid, show that you are accustomed to smoking in a high wind. Add to this that I fancied a certain slight roll to be evident in your dragging walk, and you can see—”
“Hang it, sir,” he exclaimed, “you’re a regular Sherlock Holmes.” (My heart warmed to him.) “Never could believe that sort of thing really worked myself—certainly never expected to have it worked on me.”
“And so,” I added, “life on shore has not proved quite so uneventful as you had anticipated?”
He reflected a moment and then laughed. “Ha! See how you do it this time—this cut on my cheek. Too fresh to have happened two months ago before I retired—right?”
I nodded. “An admirable disciple. You see how easy the trick is once you catch on?”
But he did not explain the cut. Instead he rambled on with adventurous narratives of his sea experiences—all fascinating and all worthy of record, but none, alas, the least bit helpful in this present session. Some other day I promise you these stories—you, in that sentence, being understood as a pronoun of strictly masculine gender. Mrmfk.
“You know,” Captain Agar suddenly broke off, “think I might have a shot at this deductive diagnosis business myself. Mind if I tackle it?”
“Not at all. We should always encourage neophytes to join the charmed circle.”
“Let’s see.” He knocked the dottle from his briar and refilled it. “This is a two-pipe problem, eh? Well, you’re a medical man—right?”
I nodded, pleased and a trifle puzzled.
“You’re retired, too. Retired about two years ago, I’d say. Gone in for writing a bit since then—quite an amount of success, too. Am I doing all right?”
I marveled, as agoggle as a clubwoman at a literary tea, and demanded his explanations. “For the fun of these tricks,” I expounded, “lies in the footnotes. Any man can make a damned shrewd guess; it’s the ineluctable chain of evidence that furnishes the sport.”
He laughed. “I’m afraid, old man, if your powers of observation are all you claim, you’ll notice that one of your legs Is quite a stretch longer than the other. I’ve been pulling it for all I’m worth. Fact is, I just suddenly recognized you from your picture. Saw it in ‘The New York Times’ or some such. You’re Rufus Bottomley, aren’t you?”
I admitted the soft impeachment.
“Daresay you think now I’m a mere celebrity hound. Matter of fact, I’d no idea who you were till a minute ago—just flashed into my mind. But now that I do know …” His voice trailed off. With the passing minutes his body had lost its weariness; but now I saw, in startling contrast, how terribly tired his eyes still were and how dreadfully wearied a spirit looked out of them. “See here,” he resumed. “You doctor chaps—understand, I’m not a religious man myself, though I’ve sailed with Irishmen and Spaniards and I’ve seen what it does for them. Conf
ession, I mean. And you doctors—you’ll do it too, won’t you? Listen—like a priest?”
I took a fresh cigar. “It used to be the fashion,” I said, “to ridicule the Roman Church for its confessionals; but the world seems to be coming back to the practice. It’s a need of the race, I fear, and people will seek it—whether in psychoanalysis or in the Oxford Group. The Catholics may be wiser than a good materialistic agnostic like myself cares to admit.”
He waved his hand, brushing away my words as casually as he did a cloud of smoke. “It isn’t theory I want, Doctor; it’s the practice itself. In short, I want to talk, and I want you to listen. You’re used to that, aren’t you?”
In contemplative fashion I drew the first puffs of the new cigar. “Why not?” I asked simply.
“Good.” He fell silent again, and when he finally did speak his voice was different. It was at once softer and more tense. “It’s an odd thing,” he said. “A devilish odd thing. And I’m afraid I want more than just an ear—” At this phase he seemed to wince and broke off for an instant. “I want advice. But hear the whole story first; they you can judge for yourself what I want.”
I prepared to listen, marveling meanwhile at the rigorous discipline to which a priest must submit. Not to eat throughout the long hours before a noonday Mass seems to me difficult, but feasible; not to smoke, however, while you listen to the long list of a penitent’s woes is to me an act of superhuman sacrifice. But I digress again. I slap my figurative wrist and return to my muttons. This then, is the narrative of Captain Fairdale Agar, as nearly in his own words as I can recall them:
“I first knew Peter Black in Pnompenh. You may not have heard of the place—very few Americans have—but it’s a sizable town in Indo-China, capital of Cambodia. I used to meet him in Red Harry’s, which was the favorite hangout of those of us who preferred a pint of bitter or a slug of bourbon to a vermouth-cassis. This was some twenty years ago—just after the war. I never gathered then what Peter’s nationality was—American possibly, I thought, or more likely some sort of colonial British—but I did get the impression that he was more or less an exile from his native land. Faced a charge of draft evasion if he went back—something of the sort.
“Myself, I don’t like that in a man. I’m a man of action, or was, and I believe that your country has a right to demand your action in her own cause. But I knew nothing definite, and Peter was a pleasant drinking companion.
“Shortly after we met, Peter Black got into a nasty spot of trouble—little business of smuggling out Cambodian relics without government permission. Big to-do about it, and no consul to act in his defense against the French, since he’d never admitted what nation had jurisdiction over him. Final upshot was really funny—he managed to prove that his ‘relics’ were fakes. That left him in the clear as far as the French government was concerned; naturally they couldn’t claim that he was infringing on government privileges by carrying on such a trade. And before the foreign dealers could take any civil action against him, he’d disappeared.
“I saw him only once again in the next ten years—that was at Mindanao, in the Philippines. He’d shifted from crooked business to shady politics—was tangled up in internal affairs in some way, trying, as best I could make out, to collect from both the Japanese and the insurrectos, and to pick up a little spare change by informing to the United States military authorities on either or both of them. When I saw him he was in jail, and glad to be there; he knew he was safer locked up than he would be out where either of the parties he had double-crossed could have a chance at him.
“I heard later that he’d been released and disappeared again—probably for good. And I never thought of him again until about six years ago. Remember that scare about spies in the Canal Zone? Secret plans to blow up the locks and such? Well, I was taking a cargo from New York down to the west coast of South America. We heard a lot about spies in Colón—got the crew pretty jittery, in fact. A couple of them quit the ship—seemed to think we were going to be blown right up boom! if we tried to go through the locks. I laughed at the whole thing. I trust our army, even the small contingent stationed in the Canal Zone, to protect us against worse threats than that. But I was interested to hear the name of Peter Black as one of the chief spies being held for trial.
“When we got to Panama, at the Pacific end of the Canal, we heard more. Peter Black had escaped—by some fabulous trick which suggested that the man, if his mind had had a single honest quirk in it, could have followed on in Houdini’s footsteps. I was not surprised; Peter, as you may have gathered, had a way of landing on his feet. But I was surprised, when we were a day out of Panama, to hear the announcement that we had a stowaway on board.
“You, of course, can see the way the story is trending, and you can guess who that stowaway was. But you can also, perhaps, imagine the complete astonishment with which I looked up from the charts in my cabin straight into the lean and badly aged face of Peter Black.
“Perhaps I should, at this point, have put about instantly, steamed by to Colón, and delivered Peter to the army authorities from whom he had escaped. But a loss of at least two days and a double-extra payment of Canal tolls wouldn’t have pleased the New York office of the line. It would be quite safe, I figured, to turn him over to the American consul at Guayaquil, which was our first port of call. A friendly government was then in power in Ecuador; extradition shouldn’t offer any difficulties.
“At least that is how I soothed my conscience. The partial truth, I suppose, is that I was glad to see Peter again; for rascal though he was, he was also damned entertaining company. I made him my personal prisoner—kept him with me most of the time—even got magnificently drunk with him one night, with a guard posted outside the cabin just in case.
“It was that night that he told me the only details I ever hear of his earlier life. He had never been reticent about the shady latter portion of his career; but no one had ever heard a word of his doings before 1917 or thereabouts. Now the best Cuban rum accomplished what no Indo-Chinese potations had ever succeeded in doing, and Peter Black talked.
“He was an American, I learned from his bitter story. Came from a small town somewhere in Kansas. Happy early life-devotion to the soil—the sheer ecstasy of watching corn grow. Something I could never understand myself; even retired, I’d find Kansas too much for me. To live where you could never behold the sea—it’s no life for a man. But the young Peter Black had been happy there. Then he went to the State University to study agriculture.
“I’ll make the story short—he fell in love with the younger sister of the wife of one of his instructors. Alice Craven, her name was. The professor and his wife were a wonderfully happy couple with a small child; and Peter and Alice, constantly exposed to their domesticity, resolved to be married at once. Then the third sister came to town.
“What she did, it was hard for me to follow. There are unhealthy overtones to this part of the story. Perhaps with your experience you’ll understand—I didn’t. But the upshot was that this sister poisoned Alice’s mind against him completely. On the very day set for their marriage, Alice left Kansas for good. She was killed in a train wreck two weeks later.
“It was this tragedy, more than any technical draft evasion, which drove Peter out of the country. Some men might have turned furiously to war as a release for their sorrow; but Peter wanted freedom and wild adventure. The peace and tranquility of Kansas which he had planned to share with Alice—now it was loathsome to him; he was unwilling even to do battle in its defense. And his hatred for this sister filled him with contempt and venom toward the whole race. Humanity was his fair prey from then on.
“I understood Peter a little better after that. I began almost to feel a stupid and sentimental regret at the thought of turning him back to the authorities, though I knew well that no sad personal history could justify his vicious treachery. But I cannot say that I was sorry the next evening when, as we were entering the Gulf of Guayaquil, Peter Black sprang overboard.
“I did what I could. We turned on the searchlights, lowered the boats, and did our damnedest to find him, but with no results. It was conceivable that a splendid swimmer might have made the coast in the darkness. It was unlikely; but knowing Peter and his fantastic turns of luck, I thought it possible. Indeed, I hoped it possible; and cursed myself for a fool for the thought.”
Here—this is Rufus Bottomley speaking again, and damning this oral delivery; but what is a man to do, short of making a jerking jargon of his speech with “quote” and “unquote”?—here the tired Captain paused in his narrative. He filled his pipe with incredible slowness, finally set it aglow with his fourth match, and then simply sat in silence, letting one finger stroke the fresh cut on his cheek.
“And what,” I asked, “made Black draw a knife on you when next you met? Fear that you’d turn him over to the army for his espionage?”
“Eh?” Captain Agar looked startled, then smiled. “I see. My touching the cut—yes, I am catching on to your methods, my dear Bottomley. No,” he mused, “I don’t think it was that. Or at least not entirely that. I rather think it was because I was the only man who knew about the Craven sisters. But do you think my story has lasted to the point of—?”
I consulted my watch. “The bawdy hand of the dial. Captain, is even upon the prick of ten. I think we might—”
A highball seemed to refresh him; some of the nervous weariness left his eyes. “It was just a week ago,” he said, “and I’ve been carrying the damned thing about with me ever since.”
“You could hardly expect a scar,” I observed stupidly, “to heal up so quickly.”
“I don’t mean the scar. You’ll see soon enough. It happened in—I suppose you might say in a dive on Main Street here. A sailors’ hangout—colored swing band, floor show of sorts, percentage girls—you know the kind of place or at least know of it. I was sitting at the bar, drinking quietly and taking a certain sullen pride in the skill with which I evaded the demands of the B-girls, when I recognized a familiar face in the bar mirror. A few stools away from me sat Peter Black. He had aged twenty years since that night in the Gulf of Quayaquil, but I recognized him instantly. I had forgotten whatever slight ill will I might once have borne him; and I left my stool, though not my drink, and went over to him.
The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars Page 14