CONTENTS
THE SALOON PASSENGER
THE LADY OF THE LIFT
THE MAN AT THE WHEEL
MY DOUBLE
THE JACKEROO ON G-BLOCK
THE LARRIKIN OF DIAMOND CREEK
THE POET OF JUMPING SANDHILLS
CHRYSTAL’S CENTURY
A BOWLER’S INNINGS
THE SALOON PASSENGER
AS the cable was hauled in, and the usual cheering passed between tug and ship, Skrimshire unclenched his teeth and gave tongue with a gusto as cynical as it was sincere. It had just come home to him that this was the last link with land, and he beheld it broken with ineffable relief. Tuskar Rock was already a little thing astern; the Australian coast lay the width of the world away; the captain did not expect even to sight any other, and had assured Skrimshire that the average passage was not less than ninety days. So, whatever was to happen in the end, he had three months more of life, and of such liberty as a sailing-ship affords.
He descended to his cabin, locked himself in, and lay down to read what the newspapers had to say about the murder. It seemed strange to Skrimshire that this was the first opportunity he had had of reading up his own crime; but the peculiar circumstances of his departure had forbidden him many a last pleasure ashore, and he was only too glad to have the papers to read now and a state-room to himself in which to read them. There was a heavy sea running, and Skrimshire was no sailor; but he would not have been without the motion, or even its effects upon himself. Both were an incessant reminder that his cabin was not a prison cell, and could not turn into one for three months at all events. Besides, he was not the man to surrender to a malady which is largely nervous. So he lay occupied in his berth; medium-sized, dark-skinned, neither young nor middle-aged; only respectably dressed, and with salient jaw unshaven since the thing of which he read without a flicker of the heavy eyelids or a tremor of the hairy hands.
He had five papers of that morning’s date; the crime was worthily reported in them all; one or two had leaders on its peculiar atrocity. Skrimshire sighed when he came to the end: it was hard that he could see no more papers for three months. The egotism of the criminal was excited within him. It was lucky he was no longer on land: he would have run any risk for the evening papers. His very anonymity as author of the tragedy — the thing to which he owed his temporary security — was a certain irritation to him. He was not ashamed of what he had done. It read wonderfully, and was already admitted to have shown that diabolical cleverness and audacity for which Skrimshire alone deserved the credit; yet it looked as though he would never get it. Thus far, at least, it was plain that there was not a shred of evidence against him, or against any person upon earth. He sighed again; smiled at himself for sighing; and, closing his eyes for the first time since the murder, slept like a baby for several hours.
Skrimshire was the only passenger in the saloon, of which he presently became the life and soul. At the first meal he yielded to the temptation of a casual allusion to the murder on the Caledonian Railway; but chough they had heard of it, neither captain nor officers showed much interest in the subject, which Skrimshire dropped with a show of equal indifference. And this was his last weakness of the kind. He threw his newspapers overboard, and conquered the morbid vanity they had inspired by a superb effort of the will. Remorse he had none, and for three months certain he was absolutely safe. So he determined to enjoy himself meanwhile; and, in doing so, being a dominant personality, he managed to diffuse considerable enjoyment throughout the ship.
This man was not a gentleman in either the widest or the narrowest sense of that invidious term. He wore cheap jewellery, cheap tweeds as yellow as his boots, paper collars, and shirts of a brilliant blue. He spoke with a Cockney intonation which, in a Scottish vessel, grated more or less upon every ear. But he had funds of information and of anecdote as inexhaustible as his energy, and as entertaining as his rough good-humour. He took a lively interest in every incident of the voyage, and was as ready to go aloft in a gale of wind as to make up a rubber in any part of the ship. Within a month he was equally popular in the forecastle, the steerage, and the captain’s cabin. Then one morning Skrimshire awoke with a sense that something unusual was happening, followed by an instantaneous premonition of impending peril to himself.
There were too many boots and voices over his head; the ship was bowling sedately before the north-east trades, and otherwise as still as a ship could be. Skrimshire sat up and looked through his port-hole. A liner was passing them, also outward-bound, and some three or four miles to port. There was nothing alarming in that. Yet Skrimshire went straight on deck in his pyjamas; and, on the top rung of the poop-ladder, paused an instant, his now bearded jaw more salient than it had been for weeks.
Four little flags fluttered one above the other from the peak halliards, and at the weather-rail stood the captain, a powerful figure of a man, with his long legs planted well apart, and a marine binocular glued to his eyes. Near him was the second mate, a simple young fellow, who greeted Skrimshire with a nod.
“What’s up, McKendrick? What is she?”
“A Castle liner; one o’ Donal’ Currie’s Cape boats.”
“Why did you signal her?” whispered Skrimshire.
“’Twas she signalled us.”
“Do you know what it’s all about?”
“No, but the captain does.”
The captain turned round as they were speaking, and Skrimshire read his secret at a glance. It was his own, discovered since his flight and flashed across the sea by the liner’s pennons. Meanwhile the captain was looking him up and down, his hitherto friendly face convulsed with hatred and horror; and Skrimshire realized the instant necessity of appearing absolutely unsuspicious of suspicion.
“Mornin’, captain,” said he, with all the -cheerful familiarity which already existed between them; “and what’s all this bloomin’ signallin’ about?”
“Want to know?” thundered the captain, now looking him through and through.
“You bet I do.”
And Skrimshire held his breath upon an insinuating grin, parrying plain abhorrence with seeming unconcern, until the other merely stared.
“Then you can mind your own business,” roared the captain, at last, “and get off my poop — and speak to my officer of the watch again at your peril!”
“Well — I’m — hanged!” drawled Skrimshire, and turned on his heel with the raised eyebrows of bewildered innocence; but the drops stood thick upon his forehead when he saw himself next minute in his state-room mirror.
So he was found out; and the captain had been informed he had a murderer aboard; and detectives would meet the ship in Hobson’s Bay, and the murderer would be escorted back through the Suez Canal and duly hanged after nothing better than a run round the world for his money! The thing had happened before: it had been the fate of the first train murderer; but he had taken the wrong hat in his panic. What on earth had Skrimshire left behind him that was going to hang him after all?
He could not think, nor was that the thing to think about. The immediate necessity he had seen at once, with extraordinary quickness of perception, and he had already acted upon it with a nerve more extraordinary still. He must preserve such a front as should betray not the shadow of a dream that he could by any possibility be suspected, by any soul on board; absolute ease must be his watchword, absolute security his pose; then they might like to save themselves the inconvenience of keeping him in irons, knowing that detectives would be waiting to do all the dirty work at the other end. And in two months’ thinking a man should hit upon something, or he deserved to swing.
The opening day was not the worst. The captain’s rudeness was enough to account for a change in any man’s manner; and Skrimshire did both well and naturally to sulk for the remainder of that day. His unusual silence gave him unusual opportunities for secret observation, and he was thankful indeed that for the time being there was no necessity to live up to his popular reputation. The scene o
f the morning was all over the ship; yet, so far as the saloon passenger could see, the captain had not told anybody as yet. The chief mate invited him into his cabin for a smoke, spread the usual newspaper for a spittoon, and spun the inevitable yarns; but then the chief was a hard-bitten old dog with nerves of iron and a face of brass; he might know everything, or nothing at all; it was for Skrimshire to adapt his manner to the first hypothesis, and to impress the mate with the exuberance of his spirits and the utter lightness of his heart. Later in the morning he had some conversation with the second officer. It was but a word, and yet it confirmed the culprit in his conviction about the signals.
“What have I done,” he asked McKendrick, “to make the old man jump down my throat like that?”
“It wasna you,” replied the second; “it was the signals. But ye might have known not to bother him wi’ questions just then.”
“But what the deuce were the signals about?”
“That’s more than I ken, Bennett.”
This was Skrimshire’s alias on board.
“Can’t you find out?”
“Mebbee I might — after a bit.”
“Why not now?”
“The old man’s got the book in his cabin — the deectionary-book about the signalling, ye ken. It’s my place to keep you, but the old man’s carried it off, and there’s no’ another in the ship.”
“Aha!”
“Ou, ay, it was somethin’ for hissel’, nae doot; but none of us kens what; an’ noo we never wull, for he’s as close as tar, is the old man.”
The “old man” was in point of fact no older than Skrimshire, but he had worked his way aft from ship’s boy, and a cruel boyhood followed by an early command had aged and hardened him.
A fine seaman, and a firm, though fiery, commander, Captain Neilson had also as kind a heart as one could wish to win, and a mind as simple as it was fair. It was on these qualities that Skrimshire determined to play, as he sulked in his deck-chair on the poop of the four-masted barque Lochwinnoch, while the captain thumped up and down in his rubber soles, his face black with thought, and a baleful eye upon the picture of offended oblivion behind the novel in the chair.
It was an interesting contest that was beginning between this pair, both of whom were strong, determined, wilful men; but one was as cunning as the other was kind, and he not only read his better like a book, but supplied in his turn a very legible and entirely plausible reading of himself. He never dreamt of impressing the captain as an innocent man; that would entail an alteration of pose inconsistent with the attitude of one who entertained no tittle of suspicion that the morning’s signalling had been about himself. On the contrary, what he had really been, and what he must now doubly appear, was the guilty man who had very little fear of ever being detected, and not the fleeting shadow of a notion that such detection had already taken place.
This was the obvious and the only rôle; he had played it instinctively thus far, and need only go on as he had begun. The reward was at best precarious. It depended entirely upon the character and temperament of Captain Neilson. Skrimshire credited him with sufficient strength and sufficient humanity to do nothing and to tell nobody until the Australian detectives came aboard. But that remained to be proved. Neilson might leave him a free man all the voyage, and yet put him in irons before the very end; it would be kinder to do so at once. However, he should not do so at all if Skrimshire could help it; and he was not long in letting fall an oblique and delicate, though an excessively audacious, hint upon the responsibility of such a course in his own particular case.
It was at the midday meal, while the smoke of the accursed liner was still a dirty cloud on the horizon. Neilson remained morose and silent, while the offended passenger would not give him word or look, but, on the other hand, talked more than ever, and with invidious gaiety, to the first and second officers. The captain glowered at his plate, searching his transparent soul for the ideal course, and catching very little of the conversation; how the topic of suicide arose he never knew.
“An’ I call it th’ act of a coward,” young McKendrick was declaring; “you can say what you like, but a man’s no’ a man that does the like o’ that.”
“Well, you think about it next time you’re havin’ a shave, old man,” retorted Skrimshire, pleasantly. “Think o’ buryin’ a razor in your neck, and the pain, and the blood comin’ over your fingers like as though you’d turned on the hot tap; and if you think long enough you’ll know whether it’s the act of a coward or whether it ain’t.”
“I’d blow my blessed head in,” said the chief officer. “It’d be quicker.”
“Oh, if it comes to that,” said Skrimshire, “I’d take prussic acid, for choice. It would take a lot to make me, I admit; but I’d do it like a shot to escape a worse death. I’ve often thought, for instance, what a rum thing it is, in these days, that a man of any sense or education whatever should let himself live to be hung!”
The captain looked up at this; so far he had merely listened. But Skrimshire was addressing himself to the chief mate at the other end of the table; neither look nor tone were intended to include Captain Neilson, the one being averted, and the other lowered, to a nice degree of insolent disregard. On the other hand, the manner of this theoretical suicide was all audacity and nonchalance, combined with a certain underlying sincerity which gave it a peculiar value in the mind of one listener. In a word, it was the manner of a man so convinced of his own security as to afford the luxury of telling the truth about himself in jest.
“They don’t give you a chance,” said the mate. “They watch you night and day. You’d be a good man, once you’d got to dance the hornpipe on nothing, if you went out any other way.”
“Nevertheless, I’d do it,” said Skrimshire, with cheery confidence.
“I’d back myself to do it, and before their eyes.”
“Poison?”
“Yes.”
“In a ring, eh?”
“A ring! Do you suppose they’d leave you your rings?
No; it might be in a hollow tooth, and it might not. All I say is that I’d back myself to cheat the hangman.” Skrimshire said it through his black moustache. “And I’d do it, too,” he added, after a pause.
Then, at last, the captain put in his word. “You would do well,” said he, quietly. “I once saw a man swing, and I never want to see another.
Ugh!”
His eyes met Skrimshire’s, which fell deliberately; and the talkative tongue wagged no more that meal.
Thereafter Neilson was civility itself, only observant civility. He had made up his mind in the knotty matter of the suspected murderer, and the latter read his determination as he had read the difficulty which it solved, if only for the present.
“So he means to let me go loose, only keeping an eye on me; so far, so good. But how long — how long? If I thought he was going to put me in irons as soon as he sights the land-”
He looked over the side, and a slight shudder shook even his frame. It was very blue water now, the depth unfathomable. A shark had been seen that morning. And, sharks or no sharks, Skrimshire could not swim! But he had two months of steady thought before him.
Meanwhile the captain showed some cunning in his turn. He evidently wished to convince himself that Skrimshire had not suspected the signalling. One day, at any rate, the passenger was invited into the captain’s cabin, in quite the old friendly fashion, for a pipe and a chat; in the middle of which Neilson left him for five minutes to speak to the officer of the watch. As the north-east trades blew as strong and true as ever, as the yards had not been touched for days, and as no sail was in sight, Skrimshire scented a trap, and presently beheld one set under his nose in the shape of the signalling-book. Skrimshire smiled. The captain found him buried in a magazine, and his little trap untouched. And the obvious deduction was also final to the sailor’s mind.
Six weeks produced no change in the outward situation; but brought the voyage so near its end that every soul b
ut one waxed merry with the thought of shore — and that one seemed the merriest of them all. They had come from the longitude of the Cape to that of Kangaroo Island in twenty days, and in all probability would enter Port Phillip Heads in two days more. In one week the Lochwinnoch had logged close upon two thousand miles; boy and man, her commander had never made such an “easting” in his seagoing life. His pleasure and his pride were alike enormous, and Skrimshire conceived that his general goodwill towards men could scarcely have suffered by the experience. He determined, at all events, to feel his way to such compassion as an honest man could be expected to extend towards an unhung murderer; and he felt it with that mixture of cautious craft and sheer impudence which made him the formidable criminal he was.
It was the night that might prove the last of the voyage, and the last night of freedom for the unhappy Skrimshire. Unhappy he undoubtedly was, for the strain of continuing as he had begun, “the life and soul of the ship,” had told upon even his nerves in the end, though to the end it had been splendidly borne. To-night, however, as he paced the poop by the captain’s side, he exhibited, for the first time, a despondency which exactly fitted in with Neilson’s conception of his case.
“I shall never forget this voyage,” said Skrimshire, sighing. “You may not believe me, captain, but I’m sorry it’s over. I am, indeed; no doubt I’m the only man in the ship who is.”
“And why are you?” asked Neilson, eyeing his passenger for once with the curiosity which had so long consumed him, as also with the sympathy which had grown upon him, despite, or on account of, those sinister signals’ from the Castle liner. Skrimshire shrugged.
“Oh, that’s a long story. I’ve had a rum life of it, and not what you would call the life of a saint This voyage will stand out as one of its happiest chapters, that’s all; and it may be one of the last.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Oh, one can never tell.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 518
