“I was curious. There’s a number, see!” He lifted the chronometer off the gimbals on which it was slung in the mahogany case and showed the number engraved upon the bottom. “I wrote to the makers in Glasgow. It was made for the Calobar twenty-four years ago.”
I began to remember now — and more than I wanted to remember. I stepped back from the counter, sharply, as though that chronometer in its battered case were alive and dangerous. I did not want to hear one other word about it. Yet in spite of myself I heard myself asking:
“It was brought to you, you say?”
“A couple of months ago.”
“Who brought it?”
“I’ve got the name somewhere,” Papyanni answered. He dived into a drawer and fetched out a long order-book, looked back over two months of orders and commissions and ran his finger down a page. “I don’t remember names very easily.”
“Well, I don’t want to hear that one, after all,” said I, turning away. But Papyanni had found it.
“Hassan Bu Ali, ‘Imam of Merbat,” he read out; so I stayed exactly where I was.
Merbat was on the Arabian coast in the district of Dhofar. So much I knew. It was also just within the area at some point of which, according to Trinic, the Calobar’s life-boat running before the South-west Monsoon might have been expected to make the land. There was a phrase Trinic had used. The life-boat was well-found. It might very well have one of the ship’s chronometers on board. There was another phrase he had used and repeated. Standing in Papyanni’s shop, I wished that he hadn’t. I didn’t want to listen to that phrase again whether a living voice cried it out in an agony of grief or my own memory whispered it. Whispered it? Across the road outside a cafe there was one of the galla-galla conjurers producing tiny chickens out of a tourist’s pocket. He had been exhibiting that trick for twenty years. But he was no more visible to me at this moment than Trinic. His voice was thundering in my hearing across those twenty years: “I want to know that my girl’s dead.”
I turned to Papyanni.
“What was this ‘Imam like?”
Papyanni described him. He was tall, stout, prosperous, clean, middle-aged, and black as ebony.
“Of course I saw him at his best,” said Papyanni.
“How was that?”
“He was on his way to Mecca. He was waiting at Suez for a steamer to Jeddah and meanwhile he had come up by the train to Port Said.”
“I see.”
I was in doubt what I should do. I wanted to do the cowardly thing. I was tempted to walk out of Papyanni’s shop without another word in the hope that this troublesome story of the Calobars shipwreck would drift back again into the fog of oblivion. And if I had seriously believed that possible, I should have so acted. But I had a conviction that it was not possible. The story had been trying for twenty years to force itself up through the crust of events and occurrences into the memory of men; and now it ensured for itself perpetuity by propounding a riddle. For an unanswered riddle outlives the world.
“Hassan Bu Ali is to call for the chronometer when he returns, I suppose,” I said.
“Yes.”
I played with the latch of his glass door. I unlocked and pulled the door open. I was out on the pavement. The galla-galla man was moving away. The iniquity of oblivion would have scattered her poppy over him the moment he had turned the corner, but over the riddle of the chronometer — no! I went back into the shop.
“I must see this monarch when he comes back in his green turban,” I said, with a laugh which could not have sounded natural.
Papyanni nodded his head.
“I’ll call you up, Mr. Woodyer, on the telephone. I can pretend that I have put the clock aside. I can keep him whilst I have it found.”
“Good.”
When I got back home, I looked up Merbat in The Gulf of Aden Pilot. Trinic had left it with me and between its leaves I found the tragic sheet of notepaper on which he had jotted down in pencil his references and notes.
Bad people, .
Anchorage safe from S.W., p-7-8.
Merbat. People civil, .
I turned to page 122 eagerly. Merbat was the principal trading town of Dhofar. It exported frankincense and gum-arabic in its own baghalahs. The ‘Imam levied a ten per cent. duty on the exports and five per cent. on the imports; and — yes, here it was! — the population was friendly.
That was all very well. But a good many questions arose. If the population were friendly and the life-boat had reached Merbat, how was it that one of the bigger baghalahs wasn’t sent along the coast with the survivors to Aden, as soon as the monsoon stopped at the end of September? How was it, if the life-boat reached Merbat and the people were friendly, that no trace of the life-boat was found when the Board of Trade and the Dagger Line sent their search-ships? And if the lifeboat did not reach the coast, how came the chronometer to? What I wasn’t sure of was the accuracy of the Pilot. It was dated 1882 and so far as I knew there had been no survey since; nor was there any reason for one. For ships whether bound east or west give that long stormy strip of coast between Ras-el-Hadd and Aden as wide a berth as they can.
I put the riddle aside and as far out of my thoughts as I could. And months passed. And my telephone bell rang. The town exchange. Mr. Papyanni wanted me. I took the receiver off its hook. A man — not Hassan Bu Ali — but one wearing the green turban of the pilgrim returning from Mecca, had called for the chronometer. Would I please to come quickly? I went as quickly as my legs, hampered by the dignity of the Head Agent of the Dagger Line, would carry me. When I reached Papyanni’s shop it was empty and the Calobars chronometer in its mahogany case waited upon the counter.
Papyanni cringed and apologized. I never saw any sense in apologies. When I am raised to the Peerage my motto will be “Never apologize,” and my crest a hand holding a hammer, rampant. However, that’s to come. I cut the little man’s apologies short.
“An Arab — not Hassan Bu Ali but one wearing the green turban — came looking furtively to the right and left like a countryman on his first visit to a town. He asked for the clock, giving me a chit and producing the money. I went to the telephone — it is here, you see, in a corner — and called up your office. I said, ‘Let Mr. Woodyer come at once,’ and over my shoulder I see a flicker and when I turn my Arab is gone.”
“You frightened him,” said I.
“Everything frightened him,” said Papyanni with a shrug of the shoulders; and I could only hope that the ‘Imam would come now in person for his chronometer instead of sending his servant.
It was not he, however, who solved my riddle. Two days later a hired victoria with a running sais stopped at the door. The clerk ran upstairs to my room with a request from the sais. Would I be pleased to receive a visit from a lady?
“Certainly,” I said, and honestly I do not know what impulse made me ask: “Does the sais wear a green turban?”
“Yes,” said my clerk; and the next moment I was at the window. Below me was the victoria and in it was seated an Egyptian lady so veiled and bundled and swathed in such a superfluity of clothes that whether she was angular or round, fat or thin, young or old, not the keenest connoisseur could have discovered.
“She had better come up,” I said.
As soon as she entered the room she said in Arabic, of course, and in a very low voice, that she wished to speak to me alone. I bowed to her and spoke in English to my clerk.
“Put a chair for the lady and then clear out!” and a little gasp, a little sharp movement from the shrouded woman gave me my opening. As soon as we were alone I said in English:
“So you were in the Calobars life-boat.”
She sat quite still. I had been guided by that swift small agitation. I reckoned that she had not heard her own language spoken for twenty years and that however carefully she had prepared herself against the shock of actually hearing it, it had none the less startled her.
“Yes,” she answered at length, and she too spoke in English. “I th
ink that I was the only one who was saved. I wish that I had not been.”
“Tell me!” I said; and she told.
“We had a terrible passage. Three days and three nights. Some were washed out of the boat, some died from exhaustion. We were driven upon a rock in the bay of Merbat. I was the only one who was saved. I was flung up on the beach half-drowned, with the wreck of the boat.”
The ‘Imam had claimed her. He had a stone-house with a garden and a pavilion in the garden for his women.
“He made me his wife...I should have killed myself if I could...I had not the means...One gets used to everything...He was not unkind.”
Thus and thus only she epitomized the history of twenty appalling years. The ‘Imam had traded with his baghalahs as far south as Zanzibar, as far west as Aden. He had put money at Aden and this spring, taking his wife with him and a small train of servants, he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. At Jeddah on his way home he had died. She was left well off.
“You are free then!” I cried like a fool.
She sat like an image. Her very silence rebuked me. How could she be free with those twenty terrible years like a chain dragging behind her? She said:
“I have heard that all those who remained on the wreck at Sokotra were saved. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“Was there a planter from Java?”
“Mr. Trinic. Yes.”
Upon my word Trinic might have been standing before me. I saw him so clearly — his insignificant features, the leather case with the two portraits of his daughter in his hands and the immense desolation wrapping him about in dignity. And now here in the same room twenty years afterwards was the daughter herself. I could not doubt it. The girl with the wise quiet eyes and the curiously spiritual look — what in those days had she been so surely expecting? — and this bundle of clothes were one and the same but for twenty intervening years of horror.
“What did he say?” she asked.
I was not going to tell her.
“He was distracted. He wanted the coast searched for the wreckage of the life-boat. We did search, the Board of Trade and the Dagger Line.”
“Yes?”
It was a question. I was telling her of things dead and done with. She held me to her question.
“He had planned to make a home in Liverpool. He was dreading going into it alone. He stayed here until he was sure that he would have to go alone. Then he sailed for England.”
She sat quietly and in silence for a little while longer. Then her restraint suddenly gave way.
“What shall I do?” she wailed, and the cry cut the air like a knife. “I thought that he would have spoken a word.”
She wanted a sign. I had been wondering why she had come to me. For it was certainly not to discuss the ownership of the clock. But the reason was out now. In the choice which she must make, she wanted to open the book of years and put her finger on a sentence which would point her the way she was to take. I sat and looked at her. After her one cry she had recovered her calm. She had withdrawn within the cocoon of her wrappings. She was shapeless, faceless. There was only the memory of her cry to warn me to tread very delicately. For, you see, I had the word she asked for.
It all seems easy enough now, but in truth I was in a dilemma at the time. I remembered the two photographs. I wanted her to recover what she could of the life which the photographs had promised her — odds and ends of it at the best. On the other hand, could any of it be recovered? Suppose that she went to Liverpool — suppose that she found her father alive — what sort of life could there be for both of them? The world has moved a bit no doubt in these last twenty or thirty years; but enough? Weren’t there prejudices rooted in the blood which no veneer of broad-mindedness could hide? However, it was for her to make her choice. I said, after a struggle with myself:
“Your father did say more than I have told you. He said, ‘I want to know that my daughter’s dead.’”
She moved or rather she bent forward in her chair. I thought that she was going to faint and pitch forward on the floor; and I started up. But from somewhere in the folds of her clothes she produced a hand and checked me. She was really bowing her head to the message.
“Twenty years!” she said. “Sorrows destroy themselves in time. What should I bring but confusion?” Her voice sank as she added: “And I too have at all events now found peace.”
She rose from her chair.
“You will tell no one of my visit.”
She did not wait for an answer. She was gone before I could move to the door. I heard the carriage drive away. A little time afterwards I remembered the chronometer and I telephoned to Papyanni to hand it over if it was called for. But no one called for it.
SIXTEEN BELLS
SYLVIA STRODE THREW a party on New Year’s Eve at the Semiramis Hotel. She summoned to it the young and lovely as the groundwork, then the lame ducks, the old friends who were getting a little sere at the edges, and the new ones with the fresh glister of their youth — the medley, in fact, in which her wise warm heart delighted. One of the lame ducks had refused her invitation, and as she looked about the big long table, his absence threatened to spoil the perfection of her pleasure. But after all he came, and the odd circumstances of his coming made that evening specially memorable to her. Some amongst her guests afterwards, when the facts were known, pretended some uneasiness, and shivered. But Sylvia Strode knew better, and she marked the night in the Roman style, with a white stone.
There were still a few minutes to run before midnight; the lights throughout the restaurant were already being dimmed; on ships at sea quartermasters were getting ready to strike on this one occasion in the twelvemonth sixteen bells; and Michael Croyle made his way between the tables as quickly as the crowded room allowed. Sylvia caught sight of him, stood up, and called him to her side.
“Michael! You wrote to me that you couldn’t come!”
“I found to my surprise that I could,” he answered, laughing. “So I ran. I am nearly out of breath.”
Sylvia made room for him at her side and ordered a waiter to bring up a chair. “You complete my party,” she said.
“You make mine perfect,” he said, as he sat down.
Michael Croyle was a man of middle age, thin, grey, and worn, with, as a rule, the haggard look of a man waiting for something to happen which wouldn’t and didn’t happen. But to-night the haggard look had gone. Michael’s eyes were bright and untired; his manner was at last at ease; he was secure; and a smile promising good news teased Sylvia.
“Tell me,” she said; and as she bent her head towards him, she noticed in the dim light that with the contentment and the ease, a new spirituality like a quality of someone borne on wings was luminous behind the mask of his face. She looked round upon her guests. They were talking and laughing at the tops of their voices with ridiculous caps of tinsel and tissue-paper perched above their gay, flushed faces. Some were exploding crackers with their eyes closed and their foreheads knit, and their heads averted, as though they expected to be blown to the skies. Others were making noises with little mouth-organs and, marvellous to relate, no one was laying down any law upon any subject. Sylvia turned comfortably to the middle-aged man at her side.
“Tell me! You have till midnight.”
“Have I?” he asked, and he looked behind him to the white face of the clock glimmering upon the wall. “I want no more time, but I do want that much. I want you to know. For you were very good to me a year or so ago.”
Sylvia shrugged her young shoulders.
“I did nothing—”
“Except make me perpetually aware that in the midst of your own happiness you had thought and time to spare for the distress I was — what shall I say? — wilting — yes, wilting under.” He spoke with a smile upon his lips, as though he was contemplating with a trifle of pity and a good deal more of amusement, some foolish child who had mistaken a slight wound for a mortal hurt. Michael Croyle had no need to be precise about his dates
nor to re-tell his story to Sylvia.
“That wasn’t very much for me to do,” she put in, “since it was at my house that you first met Joan Ferrers and came in for all this trouble.”
“My dear,” Croyle answered, “you gave me five years of wonder. Joan, twenty-three, lovely with her brown-black hair with the glinting lights in it, her enormous dark eyes, and the throb of colour in her cheeks, and I, a battered thirty-five with a wife who didn’t want me and wouldn’t divorce me. Had I been able to marry Joan — there would have been Heaven already. But we had five years — such fun, too,” and he nodded his head with a wistful laugh at his recollections. “Fun — the little silly jokes in common — Lord! don’t they make the passionate side twice as glorious. You laugh, and you slip an arm under hers, and you feel it answer to yours, and you don’t laugh any more, but you pity the world, and everyone who passes you. What a shame that they too can’t feel just a little of your thrill and delight! But there it is, poor dears, they can’t.”
Sylvia looked at the clock, and significantly. Here were the minutes running on to midnight when the lights would go out and up again and there would be Auld Lang Synes and seasonable greetings and all the rest of the paraphernalia of the New Year, and what had happened to Michael Croyle on this wonderful evening would be hidden for ever from her knowledge. For he would never tell her unless he told her to-night — of that she felt sure — he was really in a hurry to tell it — in his own phrase, almost out of breath to tell it.
“You must get along, Michael,” she warned him.
All that he had said so far, Sylvia knew already. She knew, too, of the toss which Joan Ferrers had taken when she was hunting in the New Forest; of her removal to a nursing home pitched on a high stretch of moor above that sea of trees; and of her long waiting with a broken spine.
“Joan put up a great fight, didn’t she, Sylvia? She wouldn’t give in, would she? Only every now and then a little word when she wasn’t watching slipped past her tongue. Once, on an evening when her fever abated, she said with a laugh of delight, ‘I’m cool. Think of it!’ and she drew a breath — enough to shiver your heart, eh? But she was going to mend — surely she would — and then everything came with a rush. The Powers which fix the dates — Joan was weakened down to her date. A fortnight and she drifted out in her sleep.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 814