“Mr. Iff, I beg you to believe that I have long known that man for a bitter enemy of myself, nay, of God and of Man also. But I am responsible for the situation; I discovered what was being done; and I felt bound to bring about a peace. But I am doing to force Mwala at the pistol’s point to let him go; and I shall offer to take his place.”
“You are really the most immoral person I have ever met. It’s awfully sweet of you, and all that, but you never had a pistol in your life; and if Mwala accepted your offer, well, really now?” Simon Iff was quite pathetic; his speech had failed him. There was a great gulf fixed between the points of view.
“You mean, what good would it do? That a good man, as perhaps you ignorantly think me, should die to save a bad one? I can only call your remembrance to history.”
“My dear sir, I have yet to see what good that did, especially as I don’t think it ever happened. But without the Resurrection, the Death is wicked, as Paul showed; and with it, the Death is a farce.”
“But the example! the example!” pleased the little priest.”
“Is a bad one. I admit it’s made you a hero, but only because you are a better man than you are a theologian, and a stricter theologian than you are a moralist. I’m not sure that I ought not to detain you on a charge of attempted suicide. But, as you justly urge, I’m judge no more; so let me shake your hand, if I be worthy, and bid you God speed on your noble, bootless, and unethical errend.”
The priest wrung Simon’s hand in silence.
“It’s most annoying” said Mr. Naylor. “I had counted confidently on Mr. Rose to buy at least twenty pounds worth of goods.”
The Haunted Sea Captain
The sixteen thousand tons of the Triple Screw Liner, Urquhart Castle, churned smooth sliding seas with groaning monotony. She was over three hours out from Durban, bound for Colombo. Lord Juventius Mellor had been pulled down considerably by fever during his adventurous trip across Africa with Simon Iff, and the old man had thought that a long sea voyage and a month or two in the beautiful climate of Kandy would be the best treatment. Camilla Craig, the vaudeville headliner, had adopted the boy for her 'steady'.
The weather was abominably sticky, and in the recess of the magician's deck chair stood an immense tumbler full of Dry Martini which he was sucking blissfully through a straw. In the chair on his right was Captain McVea, a genial salt at sixty, who bore the highest sort of reputation for all seaman-like qualities in the line on which he had commanded ships for over thirty years, with hardly a mishap so serious as to fail to reach port on schedule time. He had had his adventures, though, and at this moment was recounting one of the liveliest of them to an amused group of passengers. This was by no means his first voyage with Simon Iff. The magician had travelled on his ships more than once. He liked the quiet steady capable even-tempered seaman. The captain had the great faculty of carrying his hearers to the scenes of his adventures; and the little gathering was watching a munition ship ablaze in Toulon Harbour when they were recalled to reality by a steward who entered the group with an envelope in his hand.
"Beg pardon, Captain," he said. "Wireless--personal."
"Excuse me a moment, gentlemen," said the captain, breaking off his story. He tore open the envelope and took out the slip. His jaw suddenly dropped; he rose to his feet; the paper dropped from his hands; he fell forward stricken by apoplexy. Fortunately, the ship's surgeon was a member of the party. The sick man was carried to his cabin, and the passengers were left to recover from their consternation as best they might. In presence of the terrific suddenness of the event, all were subdued but one man who, with more curiosity than delicacy, picked up the radiogram. His amazement was pathetic to witness.
"I say, you fellows," he stammered. "I don't get this at all. Listen to this; it's sent from Durban, and it isn't signed, and all it says is 'A pleasant voyage to you!'"
Simon Iff rubbed his hands briskly together. "Jully, oh very jolly!" he chirped. "And I was looking forward to a dull evening."
Just at this moment the surgeon rejoined the group. "He'll get over it all right, bar accident," reported he. "But he can't speak or write at present, and at the same time he is horribly afraid of something. He seems to want something done, as far as I can make out, but there's no way of getting at what it is."
"That's as may be," said Simon Iff. "The first thing to do is to find out the events which have led up to this from the data at our disposal."
"We don't seem to have any," said the man who had read the radiogram.
"Oh dear me, yes," said Simon Iff. "This is a most illuminating document."
"It doesn't seem to be anything much," complained the surgeon, examining the slip.
"It isn't so much what it is," said Simon Iff, "as what it isn't. And as for its conventionality, the captain was disturbed emotionally in reading it. The apoplexy was but the physical echo of the mental thunderstorm. There is therefore no question of coincidence. The message meant something to the captain that it doesn't mean to us--at present.
"Some sort of code message," suggested the surgeon.
"Not so fast, my friend. We know something about the message before reading it at all. A message which can cause apoplexy means bad news. Either something has happened or a disastrous character, or something has become liable to happen. Now glance for a moment at the sender. He does not need to sign his name. He knows that the captain will understand the message."
"That is, it is a code," insisted the surgeon obstinately.
"By code," said Simon Iff very soberly, "we mean a prearranged system of communication between two or more people, who are at least on sufficiently good terms to arrange that system. this is not ordinary code of transpositions or ciphers or anything of the kind. The captain got its meaning at a glance."
"Then," said the surgeon, "it becomes more a signal than a code."
"That is a little better," replied the magician. "We can imagine that the captain, before leaving Durban, had arranged with someone to report on some occurrence, and communicate in these terms if the worst had happened. But I will ask you to consider what this theory implies. There is surely something sinister about a communication which requires such fantastically guarded secrecy as a signal couched in such conventional terms. Why not employ a single non-committal word? The captain is on his own ship. There is no one to suspect anything wrong. Observe, gentlemen, we are already getting the idea of something wrong--morally and perhaps legally wrong--it is involved in our present theory. Another point is that if this were a prearranged signal, the captain must have contemplated the possibility of the occurrence which threw him into apoplexy. In such circumstances, he must surely have been in a state of extreme anxiety. We all saw him at dinner and since then. I think we may all agree that, if he was anxious, he must be a wonderful actor. He might have mastered himself; but I think we should have seen some touch of tremor, or hurry, or something of the sort, when he took the radiogram. I am sure that we did not; but I thought I noticed a very mild surprise when the steward said, 'personal', as if he were thinking, 'Now who the deuce can that be?' Besides all that, if he had been expecting it, as he must have done if he were to understand it, he would surely have been steeled against the shock of the news. I think that we are therefore compelled to assume that our whole theory is wrong, and that this is the last message in the world that he expected. There remains, however, this possibility: that our signal was agreed upon a long time ago, and that the captain had forgotten the whole affair; had assumed that the issue had been closed. We have still, however, the difficulties suggested by the character of the message. We have to assume that McVea had almost conspiratorial relations with somebody at one time; and the whole of his career and character makes this unlikely. Now what can have happened in Durban; what (for the matter of that) can have happened anywhere? Captain McVea has spent his life on the sea, he has been a widower for twenty years and has no children, his fortune is safely tucked away in government bonds, his only love affair is his shi
p, he is not mixed in politics or intrigues of any kind; he is one of the simplest men I ever met. It is difficult to conceive of anything that would upset him unless it were a threat. He might have left a sample of blood with the doctor at Durban, and the germ of sleeping sickness or something pleasant have been found in it; but a physician would hardly communicate such intelligence in such ironic terms. Note how I have been compelled to bring in the word ironic. Irony is implicit in this message--I ought perhaps to have said so much at the start.
"Now already we know something more about the sender. He is not trying to break bad news gently--he is rubbing it in; in short, we have an enemy. How then does it happen that the enemy has no need to sign his name? How is he sure that McVea will understand his irony? Observe McVea's instant comprehension of the message. Words so conventional might come from anybody and mean what they say; yet the captain has no doubt whatever. We can, of course, imagine, since this is our evening for imagining, that the sender of the radiogram had at one time been a friend, and at that time arranged and so forth, as we hypothesized before; but that still involves the idea of conspiracy and fails to explain the irony. I think we must put that hypothesis in the locker.
"Consider once more the character of the message. We have now decided that it was not a signal. I can only think of one other thing it could be, and that is: an allusion. Those particular words must have some terrible association for the captain. Yet he must have heard those words thousands of times in the last quarter century and more that he has sailed these seas, and he has not been having apoplectic fits on each occasion. It wasn't the words that frightened the birds but the 'orrible double ongtong. Anybody writing a straight message would have added a signature unless it had been some romantic girl; and if so, why the apoplexy?"
Lord Juventius cleared his throat. Simon's glance flung a dagger, and he subsided.
"No, it's clear that McVea was not expecting anything of the sort, that it dug up something hidden very deeply in his life.
"Now, how could he be sure that an anonymous communication of this harmless appearance was in reality some shocking threat to life and honour? Only because he knew just what we don't know--the nature of the allusion. The message must be from some person or group of persons to whom these words mean something terrible. One can imagine secret socieities in which they were the valdiction to a traitor--a warning that he had been found out, and that they meant to execute him. But again this does not fit in at all with what we know of the captain's character. He never had fantastic notions--he has never been mixed up with anything shady. For the purposes of the argument, we are compelled to assume that McVea is a good man, and his enemy a bad one. Considering the effect of the message, its innocence becomes positively devilish. Now a man who commands a great ship has to be absolutely stainless, financially and in every other way. He is liable to make bitter enemies--to incur deadly hatred. A brave man (however) takes all this in the day's work.
"You will observe, moreover, that the message came from the port we have just left. One cannot imagine the message as meaning much more than that his enemy is in Durban. He has plenty of time to take precautions, one would think. But would one, if one thinks more deeply? From his anxiety to speak, to get something done, as Mr. Eliot here reports, one could seem to suspect some danger imminent. It suggests that the captain is inextricably in the toils. This radiogram reads 'malice and revenge triumphant'. The man in Durban, rightly or wrongly, is sure that he has turned the trick, and cannot refrain from torturing his enemy with anticipation of disaster. But then again, what does the message say? We have eliminated the theory of collusion. It means this: There is a man who hates McVea. McVea knows this man and fears him. There is a passage in their lives when these particular words possessed so fearful a significance that their mere quotation is sufficient to identify the sender to McVea. What then is the information conveyed? McVea must have thought that he was dead or in prison. On on other hypothesis can we explain the shock. If he had been in prison, the captain would have been able to calculate when he would be at liberty; unless he had broken prison, which doesn't happen as often as one might suppose from reading story books. Besides, if he had broken prison, McVea's course would have been quite simple; a wireless to the Durban police, describing the man, would stop his game. I think that we must conclude that the captain supposed him to be dead.
"You have all heard of the professor who could reconstruct an extinct animal from a single bone, and you may think that these deductions are rather tenuous; but, after all, the professor used to be right. We are then encouraged to go on a little more deeply into the significance of this message. Its sender is no ordinary man. He is a person big enough to make McVea afraid of him, and McVea is no chicken. We have a man of great intelligence. This impression is confirmed by the subtle simplicity of his method of declaring himself. Imagine him in Durban composing his message. He says to himself 'I have a thousand ways of letting that swine know that I'm alive and on the job: how shall I put it so as to fix my fangs most deeply?' He decides to use nothing but this terrible allusion, these words which were a climax in the past. We have no means of knowing what these events were save that they must have been such that the formula was burnt deeply into the captain's brain.
"One step further. We know that criminals, otherwise astute, often give themselves away through vanity, as in the case of the Gunpowder Plot--a weakness to warn some friend discloses a conspiracy; or, for one reason or another, the mischiefmaker wants his victim to know what is going to happen to him, and who is behind it. But would a man of such subtlety as we have deduced share in such a weakness? How could he be absolutely certain that his blow would go home? He is apparently giving his victim every chance to take precautions. This consideration leads us to wonder whether the man is in durban after all. He might have an accomplice on this ship. But would not that rather be inviting McVea to look around for an accomplice? Also, I don't particularly see this man trusting other people. One can have associations of people who are technically criminals, if they are banded together for what they deem a cause more sacred than law; but the real criminal is a lone wolf.
"I do not think this idea of an accomplice is in character. Suppose that he has bribed someone on this ship to kill the captain, his warning risks his success. It seems to me much more likely that he should leave a false trail. Nothing easier or less suspicious than to leave his message with a friend, an office boy, for the matter of that, with instructions to dispatch it at a certain time. This would both frighten McVea, and put him off his guard. The first place that McVea would by no means look for him would be on board the boat. The idea naturally crossed my mind that this chap might be an anarchist who had planted an infernal machine on the boat, and timed it to explode shortly after the captain got the message."
The company, who up til now, had been partly interested and partly bored by this elaborate gossamer of thought, began to feel extremely uncomfortable. Iff hastened to reassure them.
"I am not very much afraid of this," he said, "because the explosion has not yet happened. He could not have foreseen the apoplexy, and obviously McVea's first act would have been to report all particulars to Durban. Besides, this man isn't an anarchist. Anarchists are earnest, Godfearing people with no sense of humour, and we have already decided that this chap is an intellectual and malicious as Goethe's conception of the devil. We have now established a very strong probability that he is on this boat. Question is 'Where?'"
"We can eliminate the crew and the steerage," said Lord Juventius Mellor, "they are all good chaps. All the intellectual people are in the Second Class, and all the malicious ones in the First."
"This is not a joke," said Simon severely. "The conclusion of your argument would be that no maliciously intellectual person could travel by sea at all. But I think that we should look for him in the saloon. He would have the run of the boat, and so easier access to the captain. Besides this, he would be less severely scrutinized. We must remark, however, t
hat in coming aboard at all, he exposes himself to the risk of recognition by the captain. His personality and appearance must be branded deeply on our friend's mind, else how could so simple a message produce so tragic a result? We are therefore certain that he regards his disguise as impenetrable. It has already appeared that the allusion in the message must be to something in the past. This makes it look as though that past were somewhat remote. But we cannot content ourselves with this. We all know how, on meeting a man, perhaps hardly more than a casual acquaintance whom one has not seen for more than twenty years, there is, if not an immediate recognition, a puzzled feeling: 'I know that face; I've seen that man somewhere.' Sea captains, with their keen eyes, don't miss much; certainly not a man like McVea, who has always been particularly smart in dealing with men. Is there anyone among the passengers who was changed so as to be utterly unrecognizable? The marks of such a change would be evident. They would amount to total disfigurement. In other words, we have arrived at a complete impossibility.
"It seems as if we were thrown back upon the idea of an accomplice--a person unknown to the captain--but we have already seen serious objections to this suggestion. The way out leads us into yet more formidable darkness. This message becomes more terrible yet, if we suppose it to be sent by a person absolutely convinced that he is safe. Perhaps that person is dead after all, or at least neither in Durban, where the police could deal with him, nor on the ship, where we could deal with him. I seem to have come to the idea of a legacy of vengeance. We have the painful incident connected with the wording of the message. We see that the man concerned is dead or perhaps in prison, but he has arranged for somebody to execute his mission of revenge. This somebody is taking a long chance. We are not living in the days of the Venetian Oligarchy. Men do not execute the vengeance of others, unless they are passionately moved by love for the wronged person, or incited by the hope of gain. It is possible that a man could command wealth from a grave or a jail, and through his hireling would be unlikely to think of the device of the radiogram, the sending of it might have been stipulated. But one could hardly arrange for this in a will, and if the original man is in jail, why should he trust his accomplice so deeply? The man would have every inducement and opportunity to doublecross him. Number 2 must therefore be honestly devoted to Number 1. Here is another impossibility. We have a satanically intellectual person risking his life, in all probability, to commit a crime with a motive of sublime love and self-abnegation! From this we arrive at the conclusion that whatever Number 1 thinks or thought, Number 2 believes that Number 1 has been infamously wronged by Captain McVea. We know something else about Number 2--he is quite young; an older man does not act in so quixotic a fashion on behalf of another. We cannot suppose him to have been on the job for very long. This ship is the best known of all the common objects of this part of the sea shore. Where would be no object in delaying to throw a scare into the captain. Now, how far have we got?
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