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American Cinema of the 1910s Themes and Variations
Screen Decades American Culture American Cinema 1st
Edition Keil Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Keil, Charlie, ,
ISBN(s): 9780813546544, 0813546540
Edition: 1
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Year: 2009
Language: english
American Cinema of the 1910s
SCREEN
AMERICAN CULTURE / AMERICAN CINEMA
DECADES
Each volume in the Screen Decades: American Culture/American Cinema series
presents a group of original essays analyzing the impact of cultural issues on the cin-
ema and the impact of the cinema in American society. Because every chapter
explores a spectrum of particularly significant motion pictures and the broad range
of historical events in one year, readers will gain a continuing sense of the decade as
it came to be depicted on movie screens across the continent. The integration of his-
torical and cultural events with the sprawling progression of American cinema illu-
minates the pervasive themes and the essential movies that define an era. Our series
represents one among many possible ways of confronting the past; we hope that
these books will offer a better understanding of the connections between American
culture and film history.
LESTER D. FRIEDMAN AND MURRAY POMERANCE
SERIES EDITORS

André Gaudreault, editor, American Cinema, 1890–1909: Themes and Variations

Charlie Keil and Ben Singer, editors, American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and
Variations

Ina Rae Hark, editor, American Cinema of the 1930s: Themes and Variations

Wheeler Winston Dixon, editor, American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and
Variations

Murray Pomerance, editor, American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations

Barry Keith Grant, editor, American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations

Lester D. Friedman, editor, American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations

Stephen Prince, editor, American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations

Chris Holmlund, editor, American Cinema of the 1990s: Themes and Variations
American Cinema
of the
191 0 s
Themes and Variations
EDITED BY

CHARLIE KEIL AND BEN SINGER

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

N E W B R U N S W I C K , N E W J E R S E Y, A N D L O N D O N
L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S C ATA L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C AT I O N D ATA

American cinema of the 1910s : themes and variations / edited by Charlie Keil and Ben
Singer.
p. cm. — (Screen decades : American culture / American cinema)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–8135–4444–1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978–0–8135–4445–8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures—United States—History. 2. Motion pictures—United States—Plots,
themes, etc. I. Keil, Charlie. II. Singer, Ben.
PN1993.5.U6A85733 2009
791.430973—dc22
2008016734

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British
Library.
This collection copyright © 2009 by Rutgers, The State University
Individual chapters copyright © 2009 in the names of their authors
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce
Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair
use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
Manufactured in the United States of America
 C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments vii

Timeline: The 1910s ix

Introduction: Movies and the 1910s 1

BEN SINGER AND CHARLIE KEIL

1910 Movies, Reform, and New Women 26

SCOTT SIMMON

1911 Movies and the Stability of the Institution 48

EILEEN BOWSER

1912 Movies, Innovative Nostalgia, and Real-Life Threats 69

RICHARD ABEL

1913 Movies and the Beginning of a New Era 92

CHARLIE KEIL

1914 Movies and Cultural Hierarchy 115

ROB KING

1915 Movies and the State of the Union 139

LEE GRIEVESON

1916 Movies and the Ambiguities of Progressivism 160

SHELLEY STAMP

1917 Movies and Practical Patriotism 183

LESLIE MIDKIFFE DeBAUCHE

1918 Movies, Propaganda, and Entertainment 204

JAMES LATHAM

1919 Movies and Righteous Americanism 225

BEN SINGER

Sources for Films 249

Works Cited and Consulted 253
Contributors 261
Index 263
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to acknowledge our gratitude to the series editors, Lester D.

Friedman and Murray Pomerance, for their valuable input; to Leslie Mitch-
ner and her colleagues at Rutgers University Press for their professionalism
and patience; to the contributors for their painstaking scholarship and good
humor; and to our families for their perennial forbearance.
Charlie Keil Ben Singer
Toronto Madison
March 2008 March 2008

vii
 T I M E L I N E
The 1910 s
■■■■■■■■■■ 1910
5 MARCH The Independent Moving Picture Company launches a
concerted campaign to create name recognition for Florence
Lawrence.
21 APRIL Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) dies.
25 JUNE The Mann Act, which makes illegal the transportation of
women across state lines for the purposes of prostitution, is
passed into law, designed to halt so-called “white slavery.”
4 JULY By knocking out Jim Jeffries in the fifteenth round, Jack
Johnson becomes the first African American heavyweight
boxing champion.
27 NOVEMBER New York’s Penn Station opens, acknowledged as the largest
train station in the world and an architectural masterpiece in
the Beaux Arts style.

■■■■■■■■■■ 1911
FEBRUARY Motion Picture Story, the first film periodical aimed at moviegoers,
releases its inaugural issue.
25 MARCH The Triangle Waist fire kills 146 (almost all female) employees,
sparking outrage about labor conditions.
15 MAY The Supreme Court orders the dissolution of Standard Oil
because it violates the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
NOVEMBER Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” is published as sheet
music.

■■■■■■■■■■ 1912
15 APRIL After striking an iceberg, the ocean liner Titanic sinks off the
coast of Newfoundland, taking 1,523 lives.
8 JUNE Carl Laemmle and Charles Baumann amalgamate several
Independent production companies to form Universal Film
Manufacturing Company.
26 JULY The initial episode of Edison’s What Happened to Mary, the first
motion picture serial made in the United States, debuts in
theaters.

ix
x TIMELINE — THE 1910s

12 AUGUST Trade papers announce the formation of Mack Sennett’s

Keystone Film Company.
27 SEPTEMBER W. C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues,” credited with establishing the
blues as a recognized form of American music, is published.
5 NOVEMBER Democrat Woodrow Wilson prevails in the presidential election,
defeating Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and
former president Theodore Roosevelt, who was running on a
third-party ticket.

■■■■■■■■■■ 1913
15 FEBRUARY The Armory Show, officially known as the International
Exhibition of Modern Art, brings together over fifteen hundred
works of modern art in New York City.
8 MARCH The Internal Revenue Service begins to levy and collect income
tax.
1 APRIL The Pennsylvania State Board of Censors officially begins its
activities.
OCTOBER D. W. Griffith leaves Biograph, a company where he had been
the primary director for over five years.
28 OCTOBER George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” begins its run as a daily comic
strip in the New York Journal.

■■■■■■■■■■ 1914
7 FEBRUARY Charlie Chaplin’s first appearance as the Tramp character occurs
when Kid Auto Races at Venice is released.
15 FEBRUARY Reputedly the first feature film shot in Hollywood,
Cecil B. DeMille’s filmmaking debut, The Squaw Man
(co-directed by Oscar Apfel), opens.
12 APRIL The Strand Theatre, the largest movie house yet built, with a
seating capacity of 3,500, opens in Times Square.
26 MAY The New York Times acknowledges the new verb “to film” and
the new noun “movie.”
28 JULY Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia initiates World
War I.
5 AUGUST The first traffic light is installed, in Cleveland.

■■■■■■■■■■ 1915
25 JANUARY Alexander Graham Bell in New York telephones Thomas Watson
in San Francisco—the first transcontinental call.
 TIMELINE — THE 1910s xi

8 FEBRUARY The Birth of a Nation premieres (with the title The Clansman) at
Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles.
23 FEBRUARY The U.S. Supreme Court rules that First Amendment protections
of free expression do not apply to the movies.
7 MAY A German submarine sinks the British liner Lusitania off the
coast of Ireland; 1,198 people perish, including 128 Americans.
8 MAY Regret becomes the first filly to win the Kentucky Derby.
28 JULY U.S. forces invade Haiti, beginning a nineteen-year occupation.

■■■■■■■■■■ 1916
27 FEBRUARY Charlie Chaplin signs with the Mutual Film Corporation,
beginning an outstanding creative phase in his career.
7 APRIL Hugo Munsterberg’s book The Photoplay: A Psychological Study,
arguably the first sustained work of film theory, is published by
Appleton & Co., New York.
5 JUNE Louis Brandeis is sworn in as an associate justice of the U.S.
Supreme Court.
16 OCTOBER Margaret Sanger opens the nation’s first birth control clinic in
Brooklyn.
7 NOVEMBER Woodrow Wilson wins reelection by a narrow margin over
former (and future) Supreme Court justice Charles Evans
Hughes.

■■■■■■■■■■ 1917
1 MARCH An intercepted telegram containing a proposal by German
foreign secretary Alfred Zimmermann to ally with Mexico and
Japan in an invasion of the United States is released to
newspapers, tipping public opinion in favor of entry into World
War I.
2 APRIL Jeannette Rankin of Montana is seated in the U.S. House of
Representatives, becoming the first female member of Congress.
6 APRIL The United States declares war on Germany.
25 APRIL First National Exhibitors Circuit is incorporated by a consortium
of major exhibitors aiming to thwart Paramount’s domination of
the industry by financing and distributing films themselves.
2 JULY Racially motivated mob violence erupts in East St. Louis, Illinois,
leaving at least forty-eight people dead, nearly all of them
African Americans.
xii TIMELINE — THE 1910s

■■■■■■■■■■ 1918
19 MARCH Congress authorizes time zones and approves daylight saving
time.
6 APRIL The Edison Company, the first motion picture studio, releases its
very last film.
15 MAY The first regular airmail service begins, between New York,
Philadelphia, and Washington.
20 JULY Winsor McCay’s groundbreaking animated short The Sinking of
the Lusitania is released by Universal.
11 NOVEMBER Armistice Day—World War I fighting ends at 11 A.M. on the
Western Front.

■■■■■■■■■■ 1919
6 JANUARY Former president Theodore Roosevelt dies at age sixty-one.
17 APRIL United Artists is incorporated as a joint venture by Charlie
Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and Mary Pickford.
13 MAY D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms premieres at the George M.
Cohan Theater in New York. Tickets cost up to three dollars, the
same as the most expensive seats for a Broadway play.
19 OCTOBER The Cincinnati Reds win baseball’s World Series against the
Chicago White Sox in a series marred by the infamous “Black
Sox” scandal.
19 NOVEMBER The U.S. Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles and League of
Nations.
American Cinema of the 1910s
 INTRODUCTION
Movies and the 1910s
BEN SINGER AND CHARLIE KEIL

■■■■■■■■■■ The Birth of a (Modern) Nation

The 1910s represents a turning point for American society, a period that
saw many of the key transformations that helped shape the United States
into a modern nation. By the decade’s close, America’s global supremacy as
a supplier of commercial goods was secured, in part due to the disruptions
caused by World War I. Progressivism, the dominant political movement of
the era, guided social policy and legislation with the goal of taming the
mayhem of unchecked modernization. An enhanced sense of American
identity was promoted by the spread of national distribution and commu-
nication networks that disseminated everything from mass circulation mag-
azines to nationally branded consumer items, trends and fads like the
wristwatch, the Raggedy Ann doll, and the Ouija board, and—of particular
significance for a shared notion of Americanism—the movies. A host of new
products, from Oreo cookies to the Frigidaire and the Model T, demon-
strated how technological innovation continued to affect daily life. The hor-
rors of World War I, the first highly technologized war, underscored that
fact in a grim way. Liberalization within the social sphere brought the intro-
duction of Planned Parenthood and the nation’s first no-fault divorce law
(in Nevada). In popular culture, ragtime music, the fox-trot dance craze,
and lavish revues like the Ziegfeld Follies signaled the weakening grip of
Protestant moral austerity and the growing importance of amusements
emphasizing stimulation and fun. In the realm of high culture, American
artists in various fields participated in the modernist experiment, with fig-
ures as diverse as painter Joseph Stella and writers Ezra Pound and Gertrude
Stein redefining the boundaries of aesthetic expression. Stein, tellingly,
related her stylistic innovations to a quintessentially modern and American
mode of constant change encapsulated in the moviegoing experience. If the
movies were indeed representative of American modernity during this
decade, it was arguably the ever-changing nature of motion pictures and
1
2 BEN SINGER AND CHARLIE KEIL

the rapid transfiguration of the industry creating them that capture most
vividly their representative quality.
For many, the image that comes to mind when thinking about America
at this time is of teeming masses and traffic jams in Lower Manhattan or
Chicago’s Loop. Such pictures convey the strikingly modern experiential
milieu of at least some portion of the population. It is important to bear in
mind, however, that most Americans still lived in distinctly quieter places.
The country’s population in the 1910s was one-third of its current size
(around 100 million versus 300 million) and, while urbanization was esca-
lating, America remained a predominantly rural society. Quantifying popu-
lation distribution is complicated due to idiosyncrasies and changes in the
categories and methodologies employed by the census bureau, but as a
rough approximation one can say that in this period about 60 percent of
Americans lived in small towns or rural areas. One person in three worked
on a farm, compared with one person in fifty today. Only about one per-
son in four or five lived in a major city (that is, one of the twenty to
twenty-five cities with populations over a quarter million).
Given the rural majority, what justifies emphasizing modernization as
the keynote of the 1910s? One answer would be that all cultures have cen-
ters and peripheries, and it is invariably the centers—hotbeds of expres-
sion, innovation, industry, commerce, politics, and civil society—that
define an age and rightly attract historical attention. A more compelling
answer, the one that informs this volume, is that the 1910s was a time
when the center reached into the periphery on an unprecedented scale, due
to new technologies and systems of transportation, communication, and
distribution. The boundaries between urban and rural America became less
distinct. An urban national culture infiltrated the hinterlands as never
before, rendering the periphery’s consciousness of and contact with the cul-
tural center more extensive and palpable than in previous decades. With
ever-expanding transportation networks and the emergence of mass pro-
duction, mass marketing, and mass communications (especially the cinema),
American society became more integrated, more interconnected, and more
dynamic in its circulation of goods, images, ideas, and people.
This is not to suggest that a rural/urban divide no longer existed; small-
town America was largely buffered from the sensory and heterosocial inten-
sity of the nation’s metropolitan centers, and even a casual glance at the
period’s entertainments will find that popular culture never tired of high-
lighting comic and moral differences between provincial country folk and
urbane urbanites. In the many films focusing on small-town life, country
lads and lasses are virtuous, albeit awkward and naive, while city slickers
 INTRODUCTION 3

and “vamps” are suave but degenerate. Yet this very motif underscores the
fact that the issue of contact and interaction between the two was a timely
phenomenon engaging social reflection.
The primary engine driving new forms of interconnection was the
tremendous rise of big business during the decade, a force reflecting major
technological innovations, a movement toward stringent “rationaliza-
tion” (i.e., the implementation of optimally efficient techniques and sys-
tems of corporate management, manufacturing, distribution, marketing,
accounting, and so on), and access to enormous sums of investment cap-
ital to finance large-scale commercial expansion. The growth of big busi-
ness is exemplified by the rise of Ford Motors, a company whose stunning
success stemmed from quintessential examples of industrial rationaliza-
tion (to such a degree that the term “Fordism” is often used as shorthand
for “rationalization”). Automobile manufacturing began in the mid-1890s
in the United States. In the 1910s, Henry Ford and his engineers trans-
formed the automobile from a flimsy plaything of the rich to a rugged,
practical machine affordable to mainstream consumers. He did so by
focusing on a single simplified and standardized design—the Model T—
and innovating ultra-efficient manufacturing techniques, most signifi-
cantly the moving assembly line, which, upon its introduction in 1913,
cut the labor required to assemble a chassis from 12.5 hours to 1.5 hours.
Six thousand Model Ts were manufactured in 1908, its first year of pro-
duction. By 1916, that number had increased almost one-hundredfold, to
nearly 600,000 cars, while the purchase price had dropped from $850 to
$360 (equivalent, in today’s dollars adjusted for inflation, to a drop from
just over $19,000 to $7,000). During that period, Ford’s distribution net-
work rose from 215 to 8,500 dealerships across the country (Tedlow 125,
137). Overall, 8 million automobiles (of every make) were registered in
the country by the decade’s end, up from just under half a million in 1910
(Blanke 3).
To cite a few other examples of the decade’s shift toward big business
on a national scale, the A & P discount grocery chain expanded from 650
stores in 1914 to 4,600 stores six years later. Mail-order giant Sears, Roe-
buck saw its net sales increase from $61 million in 1910 to $245 million in
1920 (adjusted for inflation, the equivalent of $1.4 billion and $2.5 billion
today). Sales of Coca-Cola rose from just over 4 million gallons in 1910 to
almost 19 million gallons in 1919 (Tedlow 29, 194, 280). Such figures indi-
cate not only the upsurge in consumerism that characterizes the decade,
but also the degree to which the conveniences afforded by an ever more
technologically sophisticated manufacturing sector, delivered through ever
4 BEN SINGER AND CHARLIE KEIL

more intricate delivery systems, permeated the life of every American who
could afford to partake of them. Many could, as the decade witnessed
unprecedented increases in economic output and average wages. But bal-
ancing the unbridled expansion was increased concern for the social costs
attached to that expansion.
With the election of Woodrow Wilson as president in 1912, the con-
tinued influence of Progressivism on American politics was assured. Pro-
gressivism, sustained through the previous administrations of Roosevelt
and Taft, had affected not only government, but the related spheres of
journalism, academia, and activism. Committed to battling the excesses of
big business and the potentially dehumanizing effects of modern life
(largely attributable to the Industrial Revolution), advocates of Progres-
sivism were proponents of efficiency, expertise, social justice, and, above
all, the notion that it was the proper role of government to implement
them. As the name implies, Progressivism was committed to an ideal of
progress, a betterment of living conditions that nonetheless often put its
faith in the power of trained authorities and bureaucratic systems to effect
the necessary changes. Progressivism accounted for many of the notable
achievements and trends of the decade, from the introduction of labor
reforms (such as the eight-hour work week, minimum wage guarantees,
and the increased acceptance of unionism) to the journalistic tradition of
muckraking (dedicated to exposing fraudulent business practices, social
inequities, and government corruption) to the reining in of industrial com-
bines through trust-busting.
The Progressive commitment to efficiency often found itself at odds
with its own drive for improved social justice and enhanced democracy.
For example, Progressives championed the employment of city managers—
professionals hired to oversee the daily operations of municipal govern-
ments—even though this empowered non-elected officials and potentially
opposed the will of the people. Similarly, their zeal to eradicate social prob-
lems that they believed interfered with progress, such as prostitution and
the consumption of liquor, led them to propose solutions that not only
impeded individual liberties, but also were ultimately ineffective, since they
tended to attack the symptom without addressing the root causes. Critics
would argue that the Mann Act of 1910, prohibiting the transportation of
women across state lines for “immoral purposes,” may have thwarted so-
called “white slave” traffic, but also led to a crackdown on brothels that
simply forced many prostitutes onto the streets. Similarly, the passage of the
Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1919, which rendered the
production and sale of liquor illegal beginning a year later, created a huge
 INTRODUCTION 5

underground economy and inadvertently aided the operations of organized

crime in the process.
Even though the Progressive agenda was riven by its own inconsisten-
cies, the movement’s achievements during this decade remain remarkable.
Aside from the labor reforms already mentioned, the Wilson administration
alone was responsible for an extensive list of changes to the operations and
influence of the federal government, among them the introduction of a
national income tax; the establishment of both the Federal Reserve system
and the Federal Trade Commission; changes to tariff laws, loan policies,
and, eventually, in 1920, ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment,
extending the right to vote to women. Progressive reforms touched many
other aspects of public life as well. An emphasis on the value of education
led to a substantial rise in funding, so that it reached $1 billion by the end
of the decade, with per-student spending vaulting from $4.64 to $9.60
(Blanke 26). Progressives were influenced by John Dewey’s child-centered
approach to pedagogy, a philosophy that led to curricular reforms, better
training of teachers, and more attention paid to the benefits of age-specific
learning environments (including the widespread introduction of kinder-
garten during the decade, and a large increase in the number of high
schools). The need for child protection prompted the creation of a wide
range of social service agencies, epitomized by the federal Children’s
Bureau, established in 1912. The Bureau gathered statistics on everything
from infant mortality to juvenile delinquency, an endeavor that helped pro-
vide the data required to support Progressive legislation. Overall, the Pro-
gressive tendency was to educate mothers in the proper raising of their
children and to lessen the strain on childrearing (even to the point of pro-
viding monetary support, as with the provision of “mothers’ pensions”
throughout the decade). While Progressive efforts definitely helped amelio-
rate some of the most pernicious policies of earlier eras (including child
labor), they also led to intrusive and moralizing attempts to monitor the
lives of the poor and of immigrants under the assumption that professional
experts possessed superior knowledge.
While poorer females were often the focus of Progressive initiatives, the
burgeoning middle class produced numerous women who helped define the
activist dimension of Progressivism, particularly within the domain of social
justice. Civic leaders such as Jane Addams set the agenda for aiding urban
ills through settlement houses (institutions established to provide support
for poor urban women), while crusaders like Margaret Sanger pushed for
birth control to be provided to women. The common drive for suffrage
proved a unifying issue. Its implicit demand for a rejection of outmoded
Other documents randomly have
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add, and once when I asked him if he liked Rachmaninoff, he
thought it was the man who had built the Pyramids.”
This and much more came back to Ada Laverton as she turned
over in her mind the sudden wild idea that had come to her. Above
all things she wanted to see Cynthia married; she was so utterly
happy herself that she longed for her friend to share it too. She
knew, as no one else did, what a wonderful wife and pal Cynthia
would make to the right man. But it must be the right man; it must
be the real thing. And like a blinding flash had come the thought of
the Hermit—the Hermit who had come into the neighbourhood six
months previously, and taken the little farm standing in the hollow
overlooking the sea. For, as she frequently told John, if it hadn’t
been for the fact that she was tied to a silly old idiot of a husband,
she’d have married the Hermit herself.
“No, he doesn’t feed ravens,” she remarked at length. “Only
puppies. He breeds Cairns and Aberdeens. We’ll stroll up and see
him after tea.”
“A hermit breeding dogs!” Cynthia sat up lazily. “My dear, you
intrigue me.”
“Oh! he’s not a bad young man,” said Ada Laverton, indifferently.
“Quite passable looking, D.S.O. and M.C. and that sort of thing.
Been all over the world, and is really quite interesting when you can
get him to talk.”
“What sort of age?” asked her friend.
“Thirty to thirty-five. You shall see him. But you’re not to go and
turn his head; he’s very peaceful and happy as he is.”
Lady Cynthia smiled.
“I don’t think hermits are much in my line. A man’s job is to be
up and doing; not to bury himself alive and breed dogs.”
“You tell him so,” said her hostess. “It will do him good.”
II
An excited rush of puppies—fat, bouncing, lolloping puppies; a
stern order: “Heel, you young blighters, heel!” in a pleasant, cheerful
voice; a laughing greeting from Ada Laverton, and Lady Cynthia
Stockdale found herself shaking hands with the Hermit. She shook
hands as a man shakes hands, with a firm, steady grasp, and she
looked the person she was greeting straight in the eyes. To her that
first handshake meant, more often than not, the final estimate of a
stranger’s character; it always meant the first. And her first estimate
of Desmond Brooke was good. She saw a man of clear skin and
clear eye. He wore no hat, and his brown hair, curling a little at the
temples, was slightly flecked with grey. His face was bronzed and a
faint smile hovered in the corners of the eyes that met hers fair and
square. His shirt was open at the neck; the sleeves were rolled up,
showing a pair of muscular brown arms. He was clean-shaven, and
his teeth were very white and regular. So much, in detail, she
noticed during that first half-second; then she turned her attention
to the puppies.
“What toppers!” she remarked. “What absolute toppers!”
She picked a fat, struggling mixture of legs and ecstatically
slobbering tongue out of the mêlée at her feet, and the Hermit
watched her gravely. It struck him that in the course of a fairly
crowded life he had never seen a more lovely picture than the one
made by this tall slender girl with the wriggling puppy in her arms.
And another thing struck him also, though he said nothing. Possibly
it was accidental, but the puppy she had picked up, and which was
now making frantic endeavours to lick her face, was out and away
the best of the litter. Almost angrily he told himself that it was an
accident, and yet he could not quite banish the thought that it was
an accident which would happen every time. Thoroughbred picks
thoroughbred; instinctively the girl would pick the best. His mouth
set a little, giving him a look of sternness, and at that moment their
eyes met over the puppy’s head.
“Is he for sale?” asked the girl.
Undoubtedly he was for sale; Desmond Brooke, though he was in
no need of money, did not believe in running anything save on
business lines. But now something that he did not stop to analyse
made him hesitate. He felt a sudden inconsequent distaste against
selling the puppy to her.
“You’ve picked the best, I see,” he said quietly.
 “Of course,” she answered, with the faintest trace of hauteur.
Insensibly she felt that this man was hostile to her.
“I am afraid that that one is not for sale,” he continued. “You can
have any of the others if you like.”
Abruptly she restored the puppy to its mother.
“Having chosen the best, Mr. Brooke,” she said, looking him
straight in the face, “I don’t care about taking anything second-rate.”
For a second or two they stared at one another. Ada Laverton
had wandered away and was talking shop to the gardener; the
Hermit and Lady Cynthia were alone.
“You surprise me,” said the Hermit, calmly.
“That is gratuitously rude,” answered the girl quietly. “It is also
extremely impertinent. And lastly it shows that you are a very bad
judge of character.”
The man bowed.
“I sincerely hope that your ‘lastly’ is true. Am I to understand,
then, that you do not care to buy one of the other puppies?”
And suddenly the girl laughed half-angrily.
“What do you mean by daring to say such a thing to me? Why,
you haven’t known me for more than two minutes.”
“That is not strictly true, Lady Cynthia. Anyone who is capable of
reading and takes in the illustrated papers can claim your
acquaintance weekly.”
“I see,” she answered. “You disapprove of my poor features
being reproduced.”
“Personally not at all,” he replied. “I know enough of the world,
and am sufficiently broadminded, I trust, to realise how completely
unimportant the matter is. Lady Cynthia Stockdale at Ascot, at
Goodwood, in her motor-car, out of her motor-car, by the fire, by the
gas stove, in her boudoir, out of her boudoir, in the garden, not in
the garden—and always in a different frock every time. It doesn’t
matter to me, but there are some people who haven’t got enough
money to pay for the doctor’s bill when their wives are dying. And
it’s such a comfort to them to see you by the fire. To know that half
the money you paid for your frock would save the life of the woman
they love.”
 “You’re talking like a ranting tub-thumper,” she cried, furiously.
“How dare you say such things to me? And, anyway, does breeding
dogs in the wilderness help them with their doctors’ bills?”
“Touché,” said the man, with a faint smile. “Perhaps I haven’t
expressed myself very clearly. You can’t pay the bills, Lady Cynthia—
I can’t. There are too many thousands to pay. But it’s the bitter
contrast that hits them, and it’s all so petty.” For a while he paused,
seeming to seek for his words. “Come with me, Lady Cynthia, and I’ll
show you something.”
Almost violently he swung round on his heel and strode off
towards the house. For a moment she hesitated, then she followed
him slowly. Anger and indignation were seething in her mind; the
monstrous impertinence of this complete stranger was almost
bewildering. She found him standing in his smoking-room unlocking
a drawer in a big writing-desk.
“Well,” she said uncompromisingly from the doorway.
“I have something to show you,” he remarked quietly. “But
before I show it to you, I want to tell you a very short story. Three
years ago I was in the back of beyond in Brazil. I’d got a bad dose of
fever, and the gassing I got in France wasn’t helping matters. It was
touch and go whether I pulled through or not. And one day one of
the fellows got a two-month-old Tatler. In that Tatler was a picture—
a picture of the loveliest girl I have ever seen. I tore it out, and I
propped it up at the foot of my bed. I think I worshipped it; I
certainly fell in love with it. There is the picture.”
He handed it to her, and she looked at it in silence. It was of
herself, and after a moment or two she raised her eyes to his.
“Go on,” she said gently.
“A few months ago I came back to England. I found a seething
cauldron of discontent; men out of work—strikes—talk of revolution.
And this was the country for which a million of our best had died. I
also found—week after week—my picture girl displayed in every
paper, as if no such thing as trouble existed. She, in her motor-car,
cared for none of these things.”
“That is unjust,” said the girl, and her voice was low.
 “I knew it was unjust,” answered the man, “but I couldn’t help it.
And if I couldn’t help it—I who loved her—what of these others? It
seemed symbolical to me.”
“Nero fiddling,” said the girl, with a faint smile. “You’re rather a
strange person, Mr. Brooke. Am I to understand that you’re in love
with me?”
“You are not. I’m in love with the you of that picture.”
“I see. You have set up an image. And supposing that image is a
true one.”
“Need we discuss that?” said the man, with faint sarcasm.
The girl shrugged her shoulders.
“The supposition is at least as possible as that you are doing any
vast amount of good for the seething cauldron of discontent, I think
you called it, by breeding Aberdeens in the country. I’m afraid you’re
a crank, Mr. Brooke, and not a very consistent one at that. And a
crank is to my mind synonymous with a bore.”
The man replaced the picture in his desk.
“Then perhaps we had better join Mrs. Laverton,” he remarked.
“I apologise for having wearied you.”
In silence they went out into the garden, to find Ada Laverton
wandering aimlessly round looking for them.
“Where have you two been?” she demanded, as she saw them
approaching.
“Mr. Brooke has been showing me a relic of his past,” said Lady
Cynthia. “Most interesting and touching. Are you ready to go, Ada?”
Mrs. Laverton gave a quick glance at their two faces, and
wondered what had happened. Not much, surely, in so short a time
—and yet with Cynthia you never could tell. The Hermit’s face,
usually so inscrutable, showed traces of suppressed feeling;
Cynthia’s was rather too expressionless.
“Are you coming to the ball to-morrow night, Hermit?” she asked.
“I didn’t know there was one on, Mrs. Laverton,” he answered.
“The cricket ball, my good man,” she exclaimed. “It’s been
advertised for the last month.”
“But surely Mr. Brooke doesn’t countenance anything so frivolous
as dancing?” remarked Lady Cynthia. “After the lecture he has just
given me on my personal deportment the idea is out of the
question.”
“Nevertheless I propose to come, Lady Cynthia,” said Brooke
quietly. “You must forgive me if I have allowed my feelings to run
away with me to-day. And perhaps to-morrow you will allow me to
find out if the new image is correct—or a pose also.”
“What do you mean?” asked the girl, puzzled.
“ ‘Lady Cynthia Stockdale—possibly the best dancer in London,’ ”
he quoted mockingly; “I forget which of the many papers I saw it
in.”
“Do you propose to pass judgment on my dancing?” she asked.
“If you will be good enough to give me a dance.”
For a moment words failed her. The cool, the sublime
impertinence of this man literally choked her. Then she nodded
briefly.
“I’ll give you a dance if you’re there in time. And then you can
test for yourself, if you’re capable of testing.”
He bowed without a word, and stood watching them as they
walked down the lane.
“I think, Ada, that he’s the most detestable man I’ve ever met,”
remarked Lady Cynthia furiously, as they turned into the main road.
And Ada Laverton said nothing, but wondered the more.
III
She saw him as soon as she got into the ballroom. It was the last
day but one of the local cricket week, and the room was crowded. A
large number of the men she knew—men she had danced with in
London who had come down to play—and within half a minute she
was surrounded. It was a chance of getting a dance with her which
was not to be missed; in London she generally danced with one or
at the most two men for the whole evening—men who were
absolutely perfect performers. For dancing was a part of Lady
Cynthia’s life—and a big part.
The humour of the situation had struck her that day. For this
dog-breeding crank to presume to judge her powers of dancing
seemed too sublimely funny for annoyance. But he deserved to be
taught a very considerable lesson. And she proposed to teach him.
After that she proposed to dismiss him completely from her mind.
She gave him a cool nod as he came up, and frowned slightly as
she noticed the faint glint of laughter in his eyes. Really Mr.
Desmond Brooke was a little above himself. So much the worse for
him.
“I don’t know whether you’ll find one or not,” she remarked
carelessly, handing him her programme.
He glanced at it without a word, and quietly erased someone’s
name.
“I’ve made special arrangements with the band for Number 9,
Lady Cynthia,” he remarked coolly. “A lot of people will be in at
supper then, so we ought to have the floor more to ourselves.”
The next instant he had bowed and disappeared, leaving her
staring speechlessly at her programme.
“A breezy customer,” murmured a man beside her. “Who is he?”
“A gentleman who is going to have the biggest lesson of his life,”
she answered ominously, and the man laughed. He knew Lady
Cynthia—and he knew Lady Cynthia’s temper when it was roused.
But for once he was wrong in his diagnosis; the outward and visible
were there all right—the inward and mental state of affairs in
keeping with them was not. For the first time in her life Lady Cynthia
felt at a loss. Her partners found her distraite and silent; as a matter
of fact she was barely conscious of their existence. And the more
she lashed at herself mentally, the more confused did she get.
It was preposterous, impossible. Why should she cut Tubby
Dawlish to dance with a crank who kept dogs? A crank, moreover,
who openly avowed that his object was to see if she could dance.
Every now and then she saw him lounging by the door watching her.
She knew he was watching her, though she gave no sign of being
aware of his existence. And all the while Number 9 grew inexorably
nearer.
Dance indeed! She would show him how she could dance. And as
a result she fell into the deadly fault of trying. No perfect dancer
ever tries to dance; they just dance. And Lady Cynthia knew that
better than most people. Which made her fury rise still more against
the man standing just outside the door smoking a cigarette. A
thousand times—no; she would not cut Tubby.
And then she realised that people were moving in to supper; that
the 8 was being taken down from the band platform—that 9 was
being put up. And she realised that Desmond Brooke the Hermit was
crossing the room towards her; was standing by her side while
Tubby—like an outraged terrier—was glaring at him across her.
“This is mine, old thing,” spluttered Tubby. “Number 9.”
“I think not,” said the Hermit quietly. “I fixed Number 9 especially
with Lady Cynthia yesterday.”
She hesitated—and was lost.
“I’m sorry, Tubby,” she said a little weakly. “I forgot.”
Not a trace of triumph showed on the Hermit’s face, as he
gravely watched the indignant back of his rival retreating towards
the door: not a trace of expression showed on his face as he turned
to the girl.
“You’ve been trying to-night, Lady Cynthia,” he said gravely.
“Please don’t—this time. It’s a wonderful tune this—half waltz, half
tango. It was lucky finding Lopez conducting: he has played for me
before. And I want you just to forget everything except the smell of
the passion flowers coming in through the open windows, and the
thrumming of the guitars played by the natives under the palm-
trees.” His eyes were looking into hers, and suddenly she drew a
deep breath. Things had got beyond her.
It was marked as a fox-trot on the programme, and several of
the more enthusiastic performers were waiting to get off on the
stroke of time. But as the first haunting notes of the dance wailed
out—they paused and hesitated. This was no fox-trot; this was—but
what matter what it was? For after the first bar no one moved in the
room: they stood motionless watching one couple—Lady Cynthia
Stockdale and an unknown man.
“Why, it’s the fellow who breeds dogs,” muttered someone to his
partner, but there was no reply. She was too engrossed in watching.
And as for Lady Cynthia, from the moment she felt Desmond
Brooke’s arm round her, the world had become merely movement—
such movement as she had never thought of before. To say that he
was a perfect dancer would be idle: he was dancing itself. And the
band, playing as men possessed, played for them and them only.
Everything was forgotten: nothing in the world mattered save that
they should go on and on and on—dancing. She was utterly
unconscious of the crowd of onlookers: she didn’t know that people
had left the supper-room and were thronging in at the door: she
knew nothing save that she had never danced before. Dimly she
realised at last that the music had stopped: dimly she heard a great
roar of applause—but only dimly. It seemed to come from far away—
the shouts of “Encore” seemed hazy and dream-like. They had left
the ballroom, though she was hardly conscious of where he was
taking her, and when he turned to her and said, “Get a wrap or
something: I want to talk to you out in God’s fresh air,” she obeyed
him without a word. He was waiting for her when she returned,
standing motionless where she had left him. And still in silence he
led the way to his car which had been left apart from all the others,
almost as if he had expected to want it before the end. For a
moment she hesitated, for Lady Cynthia, though utterly
unconventional, was no fool.
“Will you come with me?” he said gravely.
“Where to?” she asked.
“Up to the cliffs beyond my house. It will take ten minutes—and I
want to talk to you with the sound of the sea below us.”
“You had the car in readiness?” she said quietly.
“For both of us—or for me alone,” he answered. “If you won’t
come, then I go home. Will you come with me?” he repeated.
“Yes; I will come.”
He helped her into the car and wrapped a rug round her; then he
climbed in beside her. And as they swung out of the little square, the
strains of the next dance followed them from the open windows of
the Town Hall.
He drove as he danced—perfectly; and in the dim light the girl
watched his clear-cut profile as he stared ahead into the glare of the
headlights. Away to the right his farm flashed by, the last house
before they reached the top of the cliffs. And gradually, above the
thrumming of the engine, she heard the lazy boom of the big
Atlantic swell on the rocks ahead. At last he stopped where the road
ran parallel to the top of the cliff, and switched off the lights.
“Well,” she said, a little mockingly, “is the new image correct or a
pose?”
“You dance divinely,” he answered gravely. “More divinely than
any woman I have ever danced with, and I have danced with those
who are reputed to be the show dancers of the world. But I didn’t
ask you to come here to talk about dancing; I asked you to come
here in order that I might first apologise, and then say Good-bye.”
The girl gave a little start, but said nothing.
“I talked a good deal of rot to you yesterday,” he went on, after a
moment. “You were justified in calling me a ranting tub-thumper. But
I was angry with myself, and when one is angry with oneself one
does foolish things. I know as well as you do just how little society
photographs mean: that was only a peg to hang my inexcusable
tirade on. You see, when one has fallen in love with an ideal—as I
fell in love with that picture of you, all in white in the garden at your
father’s place—and you treasure that ideal for three years, it jolts
one to find that the ideal is different to what you thought. I fell in
love with a girl in white, and sometimes in the wilds I’ve seen visions
and dreamed dreams. And then I found her a lovely being in
Paquin’s most expensive frocks; a social celebrity: a household
name. And then I met her, and knew my girl in white had gone.
What matter that it was the inexorable rule of Nature that she must
go: what matter that she had changed into an incredibly lovely
woman? She had gone: my dream girl had vanished. In her place
stood Lady Cynthia Stockdale—the well-known society beauty.
Reality had come—and I was angry with you for having killed my
dream—angry with myself for having to wake up.
“Such is my apology,” he continued gravely. “Perhaps you will
understand: I think you will understand. And just because I was
angry with you, I made you dance with me to-night. I said to
myself: ‘I will show Lady Cynthia Stockdale that the man who loved
the girl in white can meet her successor on her own ground.’ That’s
the idea I started with, but things went wrong half-way through the
dance. The anger died; in its place there came something else. Even
my love for the girl in white seemed to become a bit hazy; I found
that the successor had supplanted her more completely than I
realised. And since the successor has the world at her feet—why, the
breeder of dogs will efface himself, for his own peace of mind. So,
good-bye, Lady Cynthia—and the very best of luck. If it won’t bore
you I may say that I’m not really a breeder of dogs by profession.
This is just an interlude; a bit of rest spent with the most wonderful
pals in the world. I’m getting back to harness soon: voluntary
harness, I’m glad to say, as the shekels don’t matter. But anything
one can do towards greasing the wheels, and helping those priceless
fellows who gave everything without a murmur during the war, and
who are up against it now—is worth doing.”
And still she said nothing, while he backed the car on to the
grass beside the road, and turned it the way they had come. A
jumble of strange thoughts were in her mind; a jumble out of which
there stuck one dominant thing—the brown tanned face of the man
beside her. And when he stopped the car by his own farm and left
her without a word of apology, she sat quite motionless staring at
the white streak of road in front. At last she heard his footsteps
coming back along the drive, and suddenly a warm wriggling bundle
was placed in her lap—a bundle which slobbered joyfully and then
fell on the floor with an indignant yelp.
“The puppy,” he said quietly. “Please take him.” And very softly
under his breath he added: “The best to the best.”
But she heard him, and even as she stooped to lift the puppy on
to her knees, her heart began to beat madly. She knew: at last, she
knew.
“I’ll take you back to the dance,” he was saying, “and afterwards
I’ll deposit that young rascal at Mrs. Laverton’s house.”
And then for the first time she spoke.
“Please go to Ada’s house first. Afterwards we’ll see about the
dance.”
He bowed and swung the car left-handed through the lodge
gates.
“Will you wait for me?” she said, as he pulled up at the front
door.
 “As long as you like,” he answered courteously.
“Because I may be some time,” she continued a little unevenly.
“And don’t wait for me here: wait for me where the drive runs
through that little copse, half-way down to the lodge.”
The next instant she had disappeared into the house, with the
puppy in her arms. Why by the little copse? wondered the man as he
slowly drove the car down the drive. The butler had seen them
already, so what did it matter? He pulled up the car in the shadow of
a big oak tree, and lit a cigarette. Then, with his arms resting on the
steering wheel, he sat staring in front of him. He had done a mad
thing, and she’d taken it wonderfully well. He always had done mad
things all his life; he was made that way. But this was the maddest
he had ever done. With a grim smile he pictured her infuriated
partners, waiting in serried rows by the door, cursing him by all their
gods. And then the smile faded, and he sighed, while his knuckles
gleamed white on the wheel. If only she wasn’t so gloriously pretty;
if only she wasn’t so utterly alive and wonderful. Well—it was the
penalty of playing with fire; and it had been worth it. Yes; it had
been worth it—even if the wound never quite healed.
“A fool there was, and he made his prayer. . . .”
He pitched his cigarette away, and suddenly he stiffened and sat
motionless, while something seemed to rise in his throat and choke
him, and the blood hammered hotly at his temples. A girl in white
was standing not five feet from him on the fringe of the little wood:
a girl holding a puppy in her arms. And then he heard her speaking.
“It’s not the same frock—but it’s the nearest I can do.”
She came up to the car, and once again over the head of the
puppy their eyes met.
“I’ve been looking,” she said steadily, “for the real thing. I don’t
think I’ve found it—I know I have.”
“My dear!” he stammered hoarsely. “Oh! my dear dream girl.”
“Take me back to the cliff, Desmond,” she whispered. “Take me
back to our cliff.”
And an outraged puppy, bouncing off the running-board on to a
stray fir-cone, viewed the proceedings of the next five minutes with
silent displeasure.
XI A Glass of Whisky

“It’s as easy as shelling peas to be a detective in fiction,” grunted

the Barrister. “He’s merely the author of the yarn disguised as a
character, and he knows the solution before he starts.”
“But the reader doesn’t, if the story is told well,” objected the
Doctor. “And that’s all that matters.”
“Oh! I grant you that,” said the Barrister, lighting a cigar. “I’m not
inveighing against the detective story—I love ’em. All I’m saying is
that in life a detective’s job is a very different matter to—well, take
the illustrious example—to that of Sherlock Holmes. He’s got to
make the crime fit to the clues, not the clues fit into the crime. It’s
not so terribly difficult to reconstruct the murder of the Prime
Minister from a piece of charred paper discovered in the railway
refreshment-room at Bath—in fiction; it’s altogether a different
matter in reality.”
The Soldier thoughtfully filled his pipe.
“And yet there have been many cases when the reconstruction
has been made on some clue almost equally ‘flimsy,’ ” he murmured.
“A few,” conceded the Barrister. “But nine out of ten are built up
with laborious care. The structure does not rest on any one fact—but
on a whole lot of apparently unimportant and trivial ones. Of course
it’s more spectacular to bring a man to the gallows because half a
brick was found lying on the front door-step, but in practice it
doesn’t happen.”
“It does—sometimes,” remarked a quiet, sandy-haired man who
was helping himself to a whisky-and-soda. “It does sometimes, you
man of law. Your remarks coupled with my present occupation
remind me of just such a case.”
 “Your present occupation appears to be drinking whisky,” said the
Doctor, curiously.
“Precisely,” returned the other. “Almost as prosaic a thing as our
legal luminary’s half-brick.” He settled himself comfortably in a chair,
and the others leaned forward expectantly. “And yet on that very
ordinary pastime hinged an extremely interesting case: one in which
I was lucky enough to play a principal part.”
“The night is yet young, old man,” said the Barrister. “It’s up to
you to prove your words, and duly confound me.”
The sandy-haired man took a sip of his drink: then he put the
glass on the table beside him and began.
“Well, if it won’t bore you, I’m agreeable. I’ll tell you the whole
thing exactly as it took place, only altering the names of the people
involved. It happened before the war—in that hot summer of 1911,
to be exact. I’d been working pretty hard in London, and about the
end of July I got an invitation to go down and stop with some people
in Devonshire. I will call them the Marleys, and they lived just
outside a small village on the north coast. The family consisted of
old Marley, who was a man rising sixty, and his two daughters, Joan
and Hilda. There was also Jack Fairfax, through whom, as a matter
of fact, I had first got to know them.
“Jack was about my own age—thirty odd, and we’d been up at
Cambridge together. He was no relation to old Marley, but he was an
orphan, and Marley was his guardian, or had been when Jack was a
youngster. And from the very first Jack and the old man had not got
on.
“Marley was not everybody’s meat, by a long way—rather a
queer-tempered, secretive blighter; and Jack Fairfax had the devil of
a temper at times. When he was a boy he had no alternative except
to do as his guardian told him, but even in those early days, as I
gathered subsequently, there had been frequent storms. And when
he came down from Cambridge there were two or three most unholy
rows which culminated in Jack leaving the house for good.
“It was apparently this severance from the two girls, whom he
had more or less regarded as sisters, which caused the next bust-up.
And this one, according to Jack, was in the nature of a volcanic
eruption. The two girls had come up to London to go through the
season with some aunt, and Jack had seen a good deal of them with
the net result that he and Joan had fallen in love with each other.
Then the fat was in the fire. Jack straightway had gone down to
Devonshire to ask old Marley’s consent: old Marley had replied in
terms which, judging from Jack’s account of the interview, had
contained a positive profusion of un-Parliamentary epithets. Jack had
lost his temper properly—and, well, you know, the usual thing. At
any rate, the long and the short of it was that old Marley had
recalled both his daughters from London, and had sworn that if he
ever saw Jack near the house again he’d pepper him with a shot-
gun. To which Jack had replied that only his grey hairs and his gout
saved Mr. Marley from the biggest hiding he’d ever had in his life—
even if not the biggest he deserved. With which genial exchange of
playful badinage I gathered the interview ended. And that was how
matters stood when I went down in July, 1911.
“For some peculiar reason the old man liked me, even though I
was a friend of Jack’s. And in many ways I quite liked him, though
there was always something about him which defeated me. Of
course, he had a foul temper—but it wasn’t altogether that. He
seemed to me at times to be in fear of something or somebody; and
yet, though I say that now, I don’t know that I went as far as
thinking so at the time. It was an almost indefinable impression—
vague and yet very real.
“The two girls were perfectly charming, though they were both a
little afraid of their father. How long it would have taken Joan to
overcome this timidity, and go to Jack without her father’s consent, I
don’t know. And incidentally, as our legislators say, the question did
not arise. Fate held the ace of trumps, and proceeded to deal it
during my visit.”
The sandy-haired man leant back in his chair and crossed his legs
deliberately.
“I think it was about the fourth day after I arrived (he went on,
after a while) that the tragedy happened. We were sitting in the
drawing-room after dinner—a couple of men whose names I forget,
and a girl friend of Hilda’s. Hilda herself was there, and Joan, who
seemed very preoccupied, had come in about a quarter of an hour
previously. I had noticed that Hilda had looked at her sister
inquiringly as she entered, and that Joan had shrugged her
shoulders. But nothing had been said, and naturally I asked no
questions with the others there, though from the air of suppressed
excitement on Joan’s face I knew there was something in the wind.
“Old Marley himself was not with us: he was in his study at the
other end of the house. The fact was not at all unusual: he
frequently retired to his own den after dinner, sometimes joining the
rest of the party for a few minutes before going to bed, more often
not appearing again till the following morning. And so we all sat
there talking idly, with the windows wide open and the light shining
out on to the lawn. It must have been somewhere about ten to a
quarter past when suddenly Hilda gave a little scream.
“ ‘What do you want?’ she cried. ‘Who are you?’
“I swung round in my chair, to find a man standing on the lawn
outside, in the centre of the light. He was facing us, and as we
stared at him he came nearer till he was almost in the room. And the
first thing that struck me was that he looked a little agitated.
“ ‘You will excuse me appearing like this,’ he said, ‘but——’ He
broke off and looked at me. ‘Might I have a word with you alone,
sir?’
“I glanced at the others: obviously he was a stranger. No trace of
recognition appeared on anyone’s face, and I began to feel a little
suspicious.
“ ‘What is it?’ I cried. ‘What can you possibly want to speak to me
about that you can’t say now?’
“He shrugged his shoulders slightly. ‘As you will,’ he answered.
‘My idea was to avoid frightening the ladies. In the room at the other
end of the house a man has been murdered.’
“For a moment everyone was too thunderstruck to reply; then
Hilda gave a choking cry.
“ ‘What sort of a man?’ she said, breathlessly.
“ ‘An elderly man of, I should think, about sixty,’ returned the
other, gravely, and Hilda buried her face in her hands.
 “ ‘I will come with, you at once, sir,’ I said, hurriedly, and the two
other men rose. Instinctively, I think, we all knew it must be old
Marley: there was no one else it could be. But the sudden shock of it
had dazed us all. I glanced at Joan. She was staring at the man like
a girl bereft of her senses, and I put my hand reassuringly on her
shoulder. And then she looked up at me, and the expression in her
eyes pulled me together. It was like a cold douche, and it acted
instantaneously. Because it wasn’t horror or dazed stupefaction that
I read on her face: it was terror—agonised terror. And suddenly I
remembered her air of suppressed excitement earlier in the
evening.”
Once again the sandy-haired man paused while the others waited
in silence for him to continue.
“It was old Marley right enough (he went on quietly). We walked
round the front of the house until we came to the window of his
study, and there instinctively we paused. The window was open, and
he was sitting at his desk quite motionless. His head had fallen
forward, and on his face was a look of dreadful fear.
“For a while none of us moved. Then, with an effort, I threw my
leg over the window-sill and entered.
“ ‘He’s quite dead,’ I said, and I felt my voice was shaking. ‘We’d
better send for the police.’
“The others nodded, and in silence I picked up the telephone.
“ ‘Mr. Marley’s been killed,’ I heard myself saying. ‘Will you send
someone up at once?’
“And then for the first time I noticed the poker lying beside the
chair, and saw the back of the old man’s head. It wasn’t a pretty
sight, and one of the other men staying in the house—a youngster—
turned very white, and went to the window.
“ ‘Pretty obvious how it was done,’ said the stranger, quietly.
‘Well, gentlemen, nothing ought to be touched in this room until the
police arrive. I suggest that we should draw the curtains and go
somewhere else to wait for them.’
“I don’t think any of us were sorry to fall in with his suggestion. I
also don’t think I’ve ever drunk such a large whisky-and-soda as I
did a few minutes later. Discovering the body had been bad enough:
breaking the news to the two girls was going to be worse.
“It was Joan who met me in the hall—and we stared at one
another in silence. Then I nodded my head stupidly.
“ ‘It’s father,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, my God!’
“I put out my hand to steady her, and she was looking at me
with a fixed stare.
“ ‘Don’t you understand?’ she muttered, hoarsely, and swallowing
all the time. ‘Don’t you understand? Jack has been here to-night.’
“ ‘Jack!’ I looked at her foolishly. ‘Jack!’
“And then her full meaning struck me.
“ ‘How did that man find out?’ she whispered. ‘And who is he?’
“ ‘I don’t know. I’ll go and ask him.’ I was still trying to adjust this
new development—and her next words seemed to come from a
great distance.
“ ‘Do something. For God’s sake—do something.’
“Then she turned and left me, and I watched her go up the
stairs, walking stiffly and clinging to the banisters.
“So Jack had been there! And old Marley was dead! Murdered!
Hit on the head with a poker. And Jack had been there. It’s only in
romantic fiction that the reader is expected to assume the
impossibility of the hero committing a crime, owing to the extreme
beauty of his nature. And this wasn’t romantic fiction. It was hard,
brutal reality. The two facts stood there, side by side, in all their
dazzling simplicity. Jack’s nature was not supremely beautiful. He
was an ordinary man, with the devil of a temper when it was roused.
“Mechanically I started to walk back to the room where I had left
the other three men. They were sitting in silence when I entered,
and after a while the stranger got up.
“ ‘A dreadful thing to happen,’ he said, gravely.
“ ‘May I ask, sir,’ I began, ‘how you came to discover it?’
“ ‘Very simply,’ he answered. ‘I was strolling along the road, going
back to the village inn where I have been stopping for two or three
nights, when I saw the window of the room through the trees. The
light was shining out, and I could see someone sitting at the desk.
More out of idle curiosity than anything else, I paused for a moment
or two, and then something began to arouse my suspicions. The
man at the desk seemed so motionless. I thought perhaps he had
fainted, or was ill, and after a little hesitation I went in at the gate
and looked through the window. To my horror I saw he was dead—
and I at once came round to the other room from which the light
was shining, and where I found you.’
“ ‘There is a point which may have some bearing on the crime,’
he continued, after a pause. ‘On my way up from the inn a man
passed me. He was coming from this direction, and seemed to me to
be in a very excited condition. It was his obvious agitation that made
me notice him at the time, though in the dim light I couldn’t see his
face very clearly. But he was swinging his stick in the air, and
muttering to himself. At the moment I didn’t think much about it.
But now——’ He shrugged his shoulders slightly. ‘Of course, I may
be completely wrong, but I think it is a thing worth mentioning to
the police.’
“ ‘Would you know the man again?’ I asked, trying to speak quite
normally.
“ ‘Well, he was tall—six feet at least—and broad. And he was
clean-shaven.’ He spoke thoughtfully, weighing his words. ‘I might
know him again—but I wouldn’t swear to it. One has to be doubly
careful if a man’s life is at stake.’
“I turned away abruptly. Jack was tall and broad and clean-
shaven. Strive as I would, the deadly suspicion was beginning to grip
me that Jack, in a fit of ungovernable passion, had killed the old
man. And at such moments, whatever may be the legal aspect of
the matter, one’s main idea is how best to help a pal. If Jack had
indeed done it, what was the best thing to do?
“I rang the bell, and told the scared-looking maid to bring the
whisky and some glasses. Then, with a muttered apology, I left the
room. I felt I wanted to talk to Joan about it. I found her dry-eyed
and quite composed, though she was evidently holding herself under
control with a great effort. And briefly I told her what the stranger
had said.
“She heard me out in silence: then she spoke with a quiet
assurance that surprised me.
 “ ‘If Jack did it,’ she said, ‘he doesn’t know he’s done it. He
doesn’t know he’s killed—father.’ She faltered a bit over the last
word, and I didn’t interrupt. ‘What I mean is this,’ she went on after
a moment. ‘I know Jack—better than anyone else. I know those
rages of his—when he sees red. But they’re over in a minute. He’s
capable of anything for a second or two, but if he’d done it, Hugh, if
he’d hit father—and killed him—his remorse would have been
dreadful. He wouldn’t have run away: I’m certain of that. That’s why
I say that if Jack did it he doesn’t know—he killed him.’
“I said nothing: there was no good telling her that it wasn’t one
blow, nor yet two or three, that had been used. There was no good
telling her that it was no accidental thing done unwittingly in the
heat of the moment—that it was an absolute impossibility for the
man who had done it to be in ignorance of the fact. And yet, though
I realised all that, her simple conviction put new hope into me.
Illogical, I admit, but I went downstairs feeling more confident.
“I found that the local police had arrived—a sergeant and an
ordinary constable—and had already begun their investigations. The
principal evidence, of course, came from the stranger, and he
repeated to them what he had already told me. His name apparently
was Lenham—Victor Lenham—and the police knew he had been
stopping at the local inn.
“ ‘You saw the body through the window, sir,’ said the sergeant,
‘and then went round to the drawing-room?’
“ ‘That is so, sergeant.’
“ ‘You didn’t go into the room?’
“ ‘Not until later—with these gentlemen. You see,’ he added, ‘I’ve
seen death too often not to recognise it. And as, in a way, you will
understand, it was no concern of mine, I thought it advisable to
have some member of the house itself with me before entering the
room.’
“ ‘Quite, sir, quite.’ The sergeant nodded portentously. ‘Is there
anything else you can tell us?’
“ ‘Well,’ said Lenham, ‘there is a point, which I have already
mentioned to this gentleman.’ He glanced at me, and then, turning
back to the sergeant, he told him about the man he had passed on
the road. And it was when he came to the description that suddenly
the constable gave a whistle of excitement. The sergeant frowned
on him angrily, but the worthy P.C., whose only experience of crime
up-to-date had been assisting inebriated villagers home, had quite
lost his head.
“ ‘Mr. Fairfax, sergeant,’ he exploded. ‘ ’E was down here to-night.
Caught the last train, ’e did. Jenkins at the station told me—sure
thing.’
“ ‘Good heavens, sergeant!’ I said angrily, ‘what the devil is the
man talking about? He surely doesn’t suppose that Mr. Fairfax had
anything to do with it?’
“But the mischief was done. The sergeant formally told off his
indiscreet subordinate, but it was obvious that it was merely an
official rebuke. In a village like that everybody knows everybody
else’s private affairs, and the strained relations between the dead
man and Jack Fairfax were common property. I could see at a glance
that the sergeant regarded the matter as solved already.
“ ‘Would you recognise this man again, sir?’ he demanded, and
Lenham gave him the same guarded reply as he had already given
to me. He might—but he wouldn’t swear to it. It was impossible to
be too careful in such a case, he repeated, and it was practically
dark when he had passed the man.
“It was all duly noted down, and then we adjourned to the room
of the tragedy. The constable—a ruddy-faced young man—turned
pale when he saw the body; then he pulled himself together and
assisted the sergeant in his formal examination. I didn’t blame him—
we were all feeling the strain, somewhat naturally. Lenham seemed
the least concerned, but it wasn’t a personal matter with him as it
was with us, especially with me. All the time I was fidgeting round
the room, subconsciously watching the stolid sergeant making notes,
but with only one thought dominating my brain—how best to help
Jack. Not that I had definitely made up my mind that he’d done it,
but even at that stage of the proceedings I realised that
appearances were against him. And Joan’s words were ringing in my
head—‘For God’s sake—do something.’
 “After a while I crossed the room to a small table on which a
tantalus of whisky and two glasses were standing. I looked at the
tray with unseeing eyes—an Indian silver one, which old Marley had
been very proud of. And then mechanically I picked up the glasses. I
don’t know why I did so; the action was, as I say, mechanical. They
had been used—both of them: they had been used for whisky—one
could tell that by the smell. And when I put the glasses down again
on the tray, the sergeant was approaching with his note-book.”
The sandy-haired man paused, with a reminiscent smile.
“Ever noticed how extraordinarily dense you can be at times,
even with a plain fact staring you straight in the face? There was
one staring at me for ten minutes that night before my grey matter
began to stir.”
“Just hold on a minute,” interrupted the Barrister. “Is this plain
fact staring us in the face now?”
“No, it isn’t,” conceded the narrator. “At the moment you are in
the position of the other people in that room. Mind you, I’ve left out
nothing in order to mystify you; the story, as I have given it to you,
is a plain unvarnished account of what took place. But I’m out to
disprove your half-brick theory, lawyer-man, and to do so with such
little story-telling ability as I happen to possess.
“Now, I won’t weary you with what happened during the next
week, beyond saying that an inquest and a burglary took place. And
the latter, at any rate, was very successful. The former moved along
obvious lines, and resulted in Jack Fairfax being arrested for the
wilful murder of his guardian, Roger Marley. The evidence was
purely circumstantial, but it was about as damning as it could be.
Jack admitted to having had an interview with Marley that night; he
admitted that they had had an appalling quarrel. What was even
worse was that he admitted to having struck the old man in a furious
fit of rage, but beyond that he denied everything. He absolutely
swore that the blow he struck Marley could not have killed him;
further, that he had never handled the poker. And then, a finger-
print expert proved that he had. That was the worst shock of the lot,
and his explanation given afterwards that, now he came to think of
it, he had picked up the poker to ram the tobacco down in his pipe
convinced no one. He indignantly denied that his action in going up
to London by the last train was in any sense running away; he had
intended all along to go up by that train. And his reason for leaving
the house after the interview without attempting to see his fiancée
was that he was in such a rage with her father that he couldn’t trust
himself to speak to her for fear of what he might say.
“So much for Jack Fairfax’s case—pretty black, as you will agree.
In fact, I don’t think I should be exaggerating if I said that there
were only two people in England convinced of his innocence. And he
was one of them. Even Joan’s faith was shaken, a little.
“It was on the tenth day after the inquest that I rang up the
inspector who had come over from Exeter to look into the case, with
a request that he would come up to the house. I told him that I had
certain information which might interest him and suggested that he
might care to hear it. I also rang up Lenham at the inn, and asked
him if he would mind coming along at the same time. I told him I’d
discovered the burglar. By the way, I didn’t tell you that it was his
room that had been burgled.
“In about half an hour they arrived, and the local sergeant as
well.
“ ‘What’s this about my burglar?’ laughed Lenham. ‘A funny fellow
—because as far as I can see he didn’t take anything.’
“ ‘All in good time,’ I answered, smiling. ‘I’ve found out a lot of
strange things in town.’
“Lenham looked at me quickly. ‘Oh! have you been to London?’
he inquired.
“ ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘for two days. Most entertaining.’
“And then the inspector chipped in, impatiently:
“ ‘Well, sir, what is it you want to say to me?’ He looked at his
watch suggestively.
“ ‘First of all, inspector,’ I said, quietly, ‘I want to ask you a
question. Have you ever heard the legal maxim, Falsus in uno, falsus
in omne?’
“I could see that he hadn’t the faintest idea what I was driving
at. I could also see that Lenham’s eyes had suddenly become
strained.
 “ ‘It means,’ I went on, ‘that if a witness—let us say—is proved to
have told one lie, there is strong presumptive evidence that he has
told several. At any rate, the value of his statement is greatly
diminished. Do you agree?’
“ ‘Certainly,’ he answered. ‘But I don’t see——’
“ ‘You will shortly, inspector,’ I remarked. ‘Now who would you
consider the principal witness against Mr. Fairfax?’
“ ‘Mr. Fairfax himself,’ said the inspector, promptly.
“ ‘And leaving him out?’ I asked.
“ ‘Well—I suppose—this gentleman here.’ He nodded towards
Lenham, who was sitting quite motionless, watching me.
“ ‘Precisely,’ I murmured. ‘Then why was it necessary for Mr.
Lenham to state that his name was Lenham, and further to swear
that he had never seen Mr. Marley before—when both those
statements were lies?’
“ ‘What the devil do you mean?’ snarled Lenham, rising from his
chair. ‘What do you mean by saying my name is not Lenham?’
“ ‘You wanted to know about the burglar who took nothing, didn’t
you?’ I said, grimly. ‘Well—I was the burglar, and I took something
very valuable—an address.’
“ ‘What on earth——’ began the inspector, and then he glanced at
Lenham. ‘I think you’d better sit still, Mr. Lenham,’ he said, quietly,
‘until we have heard what this gentleman has to say.’
“Lenham sat back in his chair with a venomous look at me. Then
he laughed harshly.
“ ‘By all means, inspector,’ he remarked. ‘Only it is a little
disconcerting to be cross-examined suddenly by a man who admits
he is a thief.’
“As a matter of fact the man didn’t know how much I knew—or
how little; and between ourselves it was deuced little. But, watching
him closely, I knew I was right, and my only hope was to bluff him
into some admission.
“ ‘Shall we endeavour to reconstruct the events of the night when
Mr. Marley was murdered, Mr. Lenardi?’ I began, quietly. ‘That is your
name, is it not?—and you are a Corsican.’
 “ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what if I am? I had a very good reason for
changing my name.’
“ ‘Doubtless,’ I agreed. ‘Let us hope your reason will prove
satisfactory to the inspector. May I suggest, however, unless you can
supply a better one, that your reason was to avoid the notoriety
which would inevitably arise if a foreigner came to stay in a small
village like this? And you were particularly anxious to avoid any
possibility of Mr. Marley knowing that a Corsican was in the
neighbourhood.’
“He laughed sarcastically. ‘I think that I have already stated that
I have never even seen Mr. Marley,’ he sneered.
“ ‘Oh!’ I remarked. ‘Then might I ask you, inspector, to have a
look at this photograph? It is old and faded, but the faces are still
clear.’
“I handed the photograph to the inspector, and with a sudden
curse the Corsican whipped out a knife and sprang at me. He
realised even then that the game was up, and his one thought was
to revenge himself on me. But I’d been expecting some such move,
and I’d got a revolver handy. Incidentally, revolver shooting is one of
the few things I can do, and I plugged him through the forearm
before he could do any damage.
“He stood there glaring at me sullenly, and then the inspector
took a hand.
“ ‘Stand by that window, sergeant. Now, Mr. whatever-your-
name-is, no monkey tricks. Do you still deny that you knew Mr.
Marley?”
“ ‘I refuse to answer,’ snarled the man.
“ ‘Because this photograph is of you and Marley and a woman.
Taken abroad somewhere.’
“ ‘Naples, to be exact, inspector,’ I said. ‘I found it in his rooms in
Berners Street, the address of which I got as the result of my
burglary here.’
“The Corsican stood there like a beast at bay, and the inspector’s
face was stern.
“ ‘What explanation have you got to give?’ he rapped out. ‘Why
did you lie in evidence?’
 “ ‘I refuse to answer,’ repeated the man.
“ ‘Since he is so uncommunicative,’ I remarked, ‘perhaps you will
allow me to reconstruct the crime. Much of it, of necessity, is guess-
work. For instance, Lenardi, what was your motive in murdering Mr.
Marley?’ I rapped the question out at him, and though he’d have
killed me willingly if he could have got at me he didn’t deny it.
“ ‘Well,’ I continued, ‘it doesn’t matter. Let us assume it was the
girl in that photograph. You tracked Marley to earth here—in this
village—that is all that concerns us. And having tracked him, you
bided your time. Vengeance is the sweeter for delay. Each evening
you walked up here, watching him through the window—gloating
over what was to come. And then one night you found another man
with him—Jack Fairfax—and they were quarrelling. At once you saw
that this was your opportunity. However skilfully you hid your traces
under ordinary circumstances, there was always a grave risk; but
here, ready to hand, was a marvellous stroke of luck. Perhaps you
crept nearer the window in the darkness, secure in the fact that the
room was in a remote part of the house. You saw Jack Fairfax leave,
blind with rage, and then, skulking out of the night, you entered the
room yourself.’
“ ‘It’s a lie!’ shouted the Corsican, but his lips were white.
“ ‘And then old Marley saw you, and the rage on his face was
replaced by a dreadful terror. He knew what you had come for. I
don’t think you wasted much time, Lenardi. You picked up the poker
with a gloved hand—oh! you were taking no chances—and you
battered his head in. And then, Lenardi—and then you drank a
whisky-and-soda. You drank a whisky-and-soda, and then you
decided on a very bold move: you came and alarmed the rest of the
house. It was clever of you, but——’ ”
The sandy-haired man smiled thoughtfully.
“We sprang forward together—the inspector and I; but we were
too late. The Corsican had swallowed poison before we could stop
him. He was dead in half a minute and he never spoke again. So I
can only assume that my imagination was not far off the rails.”
“Yes, but hang it, man,” said the Barrister, peevishly, “the whole
thing was a pure fluke on your part.”
 “I’ve never laid any claim to being a detective,” murmured the
sandy-haired man, mildly, rising and helping himself to some more
whisky. “All that I said was that there are times when you can build
an entire case from your half-brick or its equivalent. And when you
find two glasses both smelling strongly of whisky in a room, you
assume that two people have drunk whisky. Which was where the
Corsican tripped up. You see, he distinctly swore he hadn’t entered
the room till he came in with us.”
The Barrister raised protesting hands to the ceiling.
“The man is indubitably mad,” he remarked to no one in
particular. “Was not Fairfax in the room most of the evening?”
The sandy-haired man looked even more mild.
“I think that perhaps I ought to have mentioned one fact sooner,
but I was afraid it would spoil the story. The cat has an aversion to
water; the fish have an aversion to dry land. But both these
aversions pale into total insignificance when compared to Jack
Fairfax’s aversion to whisky.”
He gazed thoughtfully at his glass.
“A strange flaw in an otherwise fine character. Thank heavens the
symptom is not common!”

XII The Man Who Could Not Get Drunk

“Yes; she’s a beautiful woman. There’s no doubt about that. What

did you say her name was?”
“I haven’t mentioned her name,” I returned. “But there’s no
secret about it. She is Lady Sylvia Clavering.”
“Ah! Sylvia. Of course, I remember now.”
 He drained his glass of brandy and sat back in his chair, while his
eyes followed one of the most beautiful women in London as she
threaded her way through the tables towards the entrance of the
restaurant. An obsequious head-waiter bent almost double as she
passed; her exit, as usual, befitted one of the most be-photographed
women of Society. And it was not until the doors had swung to
behind her and her escort that the man I had been dining with
spoke again.
“I guess that little bow she gave as she passed here was yours,
not mine,” he said, with the suspicion of a smile.
“Presumably,” I answered a little curtly. “Unless you happen to
know her. I have that privilege.”
His smile grew a trifle more pronounced though his eyes were set
and steady. “Know her?” He beckoned to the waiter for more brandy.
“No, I can’t say I know her. In fact, my sole claim to
acquaintanceship is that I carried her for three miles in the dark one
night, slung over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes. But I don’t
know her.”
“You did what?” I cried, staring at him in amazement.
“Sounds a bit over the odds, I admit.” He was carefully cutting
the end off his cigar. “Nevertheless it stands.”
Now when any man states that he has carried a woman for three
miles, whether it be in the dark or not, and has followed up such an
introduction so indifferently that the woman fails even to recognise
him afterwards, there would seem to be the promise of a story. But
when the woman is one of the Lady Sylvia Claverings of this world,
and the man is of the type of my dinner companion, the promise
resolves itself into a certainty.
Merton was one of those indefinable characters who defy placing.
You felt that if you landed in Yokohama, and he was with you, you
would instinctively rely on him for information as to the best thing to
do and the best way to do it. There seemed to be no part of the
globe, from the South Sea Islands going westward to Alaska, with
which he was not as well acquainted as the ordinary man is with his
native village. At the time I did not know him well. The dinner was
only our third meeting, and during the meal we confined ourselves
to the business which had been the original cause of our running
across one another at all. But even in that short time I had realised
that Billy Merton was a white man. And not only was he straight, but
he was essentially a useful person to have at one’s side in a tight
corner.
“Are you disposed to elaborate your somewhat amazing
statement?” I asked, after a pause.
For a moment or two he hesitated, and his eyes became
thoughtful.
“I don’t suppose there’s any reason why I shouldn’t,” he
answered slowly. “It’s ancient history now—ten years or so.”
“That was just about the time she was married,” I remarked.
He nodded. “She was on her honeymoon when it happened.
Well, if you want to hear the yarn, come round to my club.”
“Why, certainly,” I said, beckoning for the bill. “Let’s get on at
once; I’m curious.”
“Do you know Africa at all?” he asked me, as we pulled our
chairs up to the fire. We had the room almost to ourselves; a gentle
snoring from the other fireplace betokened the only other occupant.
“Egypt,” I answered. “Parts of South Africa. The usual thing:
nothing out of the ordinary.”
He nodded. “It was up the West Coast that it happened,” he
began, after his pipe was going to his satisfaction. “And though I’ve
been in many God-forsaken spots in my life, I’ve never yet struck
anything to compare with that place. Nwambi it was called—just a
few shacks stretching in from the sea along a straggling, dusty street
—one so-called shop and a bar. It called itself an hotel, but Lord help
the person who tried to put up there. It was a bar pure and simple,
though no one could call the liquor that. Lukewarm gin, some vile
substitute for whisky, the usual short drinks, and some local poisons
formed the stock; I ought to know—I was the bartender.
“For about three miles inland there stretched a belt of stinking
swamp—one vast malaria hot-bed—and over this belt the straggling
street meandered towards the low foot-hills beyond. At times it
almost lost itself: but if you didn’t give up hope, or expire from the
stench, and cast about you’d generally find it again leading you on
to where you felt you might get a breath of God’s fresh air in the
hills. As a matter of fact you didn’t; the utmost one can say is that it
wasn’t quite so appalling as in the swamp itself. Mosquitoes!
Heavens! they had to be seen to be believed. I’ve watched ’em there
literally like a grey cloud.”
Merton smiled reminiscently.
“That—and the eternal boom of the sea on the bar half a mile
out, made up Nwambi. How any white man ever got through alive if
he had to stop there any length of time is beyond me; to be
accurate, very few did. It was a grave, that place, and only the
down-and-outers went there. At the time I was one myself.
“The sole reason for its existence at all was that the water
alongside the quay was deep enough for good-sized boats to come
in, and most of the native produce from the district inland found its
way down to Nwambi for shipment. Once over the belt of swamp
and a few miles into the hills the climate was much better, and half a
dozen traders in a biggish way had bungalows there. They were
Dagos most of them—it wasn’t a British part of the West Coast—and
I frankly admit that my love for the Dago has never been very great.
But there was one Scotchman, McAndrew, amongst them—and he
was the first fellow who came into the bar after I’d taken over the
job. He was down for the night about some question of freight.
“ ‘You’re new,’ he remarked, leaning against the counter. ‘What’s
happened to the other fellow? Is he dead?’
“ ‘Probably,’ I returned. ‘What do you want?’
“ ‘Gin—double tot. What’s your name?’
“I told him, and he pondered the matter while he finished his
drink.
“ ‘Well,’ he said at length, ‘I warned your predecessor, and I’ll
warn you. Don’t fall foul of my manager down here. Name of
Mainwaring—I do not think. Don’t give him advice about keeping off
the drink, or he’ll kill you. He’s killing himself, but that’s his business.
I’m tough—you look tough, but he’s got us beat to a frazzle. And
take cover if he ever gets mixed up with any of the Dagos—the place
isn’t healthy.’
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