The Complete Simon Iff (52 page)

The girl refused any ordinary oath. “My father was a hunter, and my man is a hunter,” she said, with an extraordinary grin, “I must swear upon two rifles.”

They yielded to her whim. But two ordinary rifles would not do; one must come from one side and one from the other. So one of M’Qob’s men and one one of Mwala’s obliged. Having been duly sworn, she refused to testify. “I have already told everything,” she said with an impudent grin.

Mwala and M’Qob conferred together in agitation. Father Duval kept his lips firmly set in silence.

“The whole method of Science,” said Iff, “consists in putting two similar things together, and two dissimilar things apart. We need an expert witness. Call the Honourable Charles Sexton! Swear the Honourable Charles Sexton!”

The witness claimed to be an amateur explorer, hunter, and collector.

“You are familiar with firearms of all sorts?”

“I am. I have actually worked in a factory, so as to be able to repair my own guns in case of accident; I was also in the Ordnance when I served in the army.”

“What are the principal differences between these two rifles?” Iff caused them to be handed to him. The witness grinned, and was most sternly rebuked.

“My lord,” said the hunter, “there is only one difference; this rifle is numbered F31876, and this one F32124.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sexton; that will do. Bring Mr. Rose back; he must hear the rest.”

By this time Mwala was itching to make a bolt for it. His dignity, and perhaps his sense of Fate, kept him statue-steady.

“King Mwala,” said Simon sternly, “there is no justice without Truth. It is useless moreover to seek to hide from me what I already know; what every one here, even Mr. Rose, knows, unless there be some imbecile among us. And Bill, who only smells things! I tell you, King Mwala, that it is even bad policy, though you think otherwise so strongly—no doubt the cause of your stubbornness—to stick to this stupid story of the peace sacrifice. Unless you speak, I break this Feather hear and now!”

The king rose violently as if with some gigantic determination. He caught up the two rifles, and thrust them out over the head of the Baptist Missionary.

“Father of Justice,” said the king solemnly, “I said Peace-Sacrifice, and spake no lie. Three years ago M’Qob and I were brothers. Then came this Rose, and warned me secretly against M’Qob, and sold me guns, and at the same time warned my brother against me, and sold him guns. These and guns came in the same consignment from America; three hundred and a score of my children, four hundred and two score of my brothers, are dead. To have a lasting peace, one must do justice on the maker of the war.”

He stopped dramatically.

“Mr. Rose,” said Simon Iff, “what have you to say to this?”

Not speech but inarticulate shrieks, bestrewn with hideous blasphemies, obscene curses, answered him. The missionary, in abject bodily pain, and utmost horror of soul, sounded every abyss of hell in a few minutes. Exhaustion silenced him at last.

“Your majesty,” said the magician solemnly. “I restore to you your Justice.” And he replaced the Feather in the King’s headdress. Mwala signed to his man, who caught up the litter and began to carry it toward the river. He and M’Qob saluted the little party of whites, and walked together in the same path.

No sooner was Mwala’s back turned than Father Duval cried out. “You’re judge no more, and Mwala isn’t here. Let me go!”

“I purge you of contempt,” smiled simon. “And I wish you luck. But remember that you’re a wicked Papist, worse than an idolater, in the eyes of Mr. Rose, whose pupil is a strict Baptist, very severe in his morals, though I’m glad to say he keeps to native ideas of Justice. You’ve no influence with Mwala; rose saw to that. The wicked are fallen into the pit that themselves digged.”

“Mr. Iff, I beg you to believe that I have long known that man for a bitter enemy of myself, nay, of God and of Man also. But I am responsible for the situation; I discovered what was being done; and I felt bound to bring about a peace. But I am doing to force Mwala at the pistol’s point to let him go; and I shall offer to take his place.”

“You are really the most immoral person I have ever met. It’s awfully sweet of you, and all that, but you never had a pistol in your life; and if Mwala accepted your offer, well, really now?” Simon Iff was quite pathetic; his speech had failed him. There was a great gulf fixed between the points of view.

“You mean, what good would it do? That a good man, as perhaps you ignorantly think me, should die to save a bad one? I can only call your remembrance to history.”

“My dear sir, I have yet to see what good that did, especially as I don’t think it ever happened. But without the Resurrection, the Death is wicked, as Paul showed; and with it, the Death is a farce.”

“But the example! the example!” pleased the little priest.”

“Is a bad one. I admit it’s made you a hero, but only because you are a better man than you are a theologian, and a stricter theologian than you are a moralist. I’m not sure that I ought not to detain you on a charge of attempted suicide. But, as you justly urge, I’m judge no more; so let me shake your hand, if I be worthy, and bid you God speed on your noble, bootless, and unethical errend.”

The priest wrung Simon’s hand in silence.

“It’s most annoying” said Mr. Naylor. “I had counted confidently on Mr. Rose to buy at least twenty pounds worth of goods.”

The sixteen thousand tons of the Triple Screw Liner, Urquhart Castle, churned smooth sliding seas with groaning monotony. She was over three hours out from Durban, bound for Colombo. Lord Juventius Mellor had been pulled down considerably by fever during his adventurous trip across Africa with Simon Iff, and the old man had thought that a long sea voyage and a month or two in the beautiful climate of Kandy would be the best treatment. Camilla Craig, the vaudeville headliner, had adopted the boy for her 'steady'.

The weather was abominably sticky, and in the recess of the magician's deck chair stood an immense tumbler full of Dry Martini which he was sucking blissfully through a straw. In the chair on his right was Captain McVea, a genial salt at sixty, who bore the highest sort of reputation for all seaman-like qualities in the line on which he had commanded ships for over thirty years, with hardly a mishap so serious as to fail to reach port on schedule time. He had had his adventures, though, and at this moment was recounting one of the liveliest of them to an amused group of passengers. This was by no means his first voyage with Simon Iff. The magician had travelled on his ships more than once. He liked the quiet steady capable even-tempered seaman. The captain had the great faculty of carrying his hearers to the scenes of his adventures; and the little gathering was watching a munition ship ablaze in Toulon Harbour when they were recalled to reality by a steward who entered the group with an envelope in his hand.

"Beg pardon, Captain," he said. "Wireless--personal."

"Excuse me a moment, gentlemen," said the captain, breaking off his story. He tore open the envelope and took out the slip. His jaw suddenly dropped; he rose to his feet; the paper dropped from his hands; he fell forward stricken by apoplexy. Fortunately, the ship's surgeon was a member of the party. The sick man was carried to his cabin, and the passengers were left to recover from their consternation as best they might. In presence of the terrific suddenness of the event, all were subdued but one man who, with more curiosity than delicacy, picked up the radiogram. His amazement was pathetic to witness.

"I say, you fellows," he stammered. "I don't get this at all. Listen to this; it's sent from Durban, and it isn't signed, and all it says is 'A pleasant voyage to you!'"

Simon Iff rubbed his hands briskly together. "Jully, oh very jolly!" he chirped. "And I was looking forward to a dull evening."

Just at this moment the surgeon rejoined the group. "He'll get over it all right, bar accident," reported he. "But he can't speak or write at present, and at the same time he is horribly afraid of something. He seems to want something done, as far as I can make out, but there's no way of getting at what it is."

"That's as may be," said Simon Iff. "The first thing to do is to find out the events which have led up to this from the data at our disposal."

"We don't seem to have any," said the man who had read the radiogram.

"Oh dear me, yes," said Simon Iff. "This is a most illuminating document."

"It doesn't seem to be anything much," complained the surgeon, examining the slip.

"It isn't so much what it is," said Simon Iff, "as what it isn't. And as for its conventionality, the captain was disturbed emotionally in reading it. The apoplexy was but the physical echo of the mental thunderstorm. There is therefore no question of coincidence. The message meant something to the captain that it doesn't mean to us--at present.

"Some sort of code message," suggested the surgeon.

"Not so fast, my friend. We know something about the message before reading it at all. A message which can cause apoplexy means bad news. Either something has happened or a disastrous character, or something has become liable to happen. Now glance for a moment at the sender. He does not need to sign his name. He knows that the captain will understand the message."

"That is, it is a code," insisted the surgeon obstinately.

"By code," said Simon Iff very soberly, "we mean a prearranged system of communication between two or more people, who are at least on sufficiently good terms to arrange that system. this is not ordinary code of transpositions or ciphers or anything of the kind. The captain got its meaning at a glance."

"Then," said the surgeon, "it becomes more a signal than a code."

"That is a little better," replied the magician. "We can imagine that the captain, before leaving Durban, had arranged with someone to report on some occurrence, and communicate in these terms if the worst had happened. But I will ask you to consider what this theory implies. There is surely something sinister about a communication which requires such fantastically guarded secrecy as a signal couched in such conventional terms. Why not employ a single non-committal word? The captain is on his own ship. There is no one to suspect anything wrong. Observe, gentlemen, we are already getting the idea of something wrong--morally and perhaps legally wrong--it is involved in our present theory. Another point is that if this were a prearranged signal, the captain must have contemplated the possibility of the occurrence which threw him into apoplexy. In such circumstances, he must surely have been in a state of extreme anxiety. We all saw him at dinner and since then. I think we may all agree that, if he was anxious, he must be a wonderful actor. He might have mastered himself; but I think we should have seen some touch of tremor, or hurry, or something of the sort, when he took the radiogram. I am sure that we did not; but I thought I noticed a very mild surprise when the steward said, 'personal', as if he were thinking, 'Now who the deuce can that be?' Besides all that, if he had been expecting it, as he must have done if he were to understand it, he would surely have been steeled against the shock of the news. I think that we are therefore compelled to assume that our whole theory is wrong, and that this is the last message in the world that he expected. There remains, however, this possibility: that our signal was agreed upon a long time ago, and that the captain had forgotten the whole affair; had assumed that the issue had been closed. We have still, however, the difficulties suggested by the character of the message. We have to assume that McVea had almost conspiratorial relations with somebody at one time; and the whole of his career and character makes this unlikely. Now what can have happened in Durban; what (for the matter of that) can have happened anywhere? Captain McVea has spent his life on the sea, he has been a widower for twenty years and has no children, his fortune is safely tucked away in government bonds, his only love affair is his ship, he is not mixed in politics or intrigues of any kind; he is one of the simplest men I ever met. It is difficult to conceive of anything that would upset him unless it were a threat. He might have left a sample of blood with the doctor at Durban, and the germ of sleeping sickness or something pleasant have been found in it; but a physician would hardly communicate such intelligence in such ironic terms. Note how I have been compelled to bring in the word ironic. Irony is implicit in this message--I ought perhaps to have said so much at the start.

"Now already we know something more about the sender. He is not trying to break bad news gently--he is rubbing it in; in short, we have an enemy. How then does it happen that the enemy has no need to sign his name? How is he sure that McVea will understand his irony? Observe McVea's instant comprehension of the message. Words so conventional might come from anybody and mean what they say; yet the captain has no doubt whatever. We can, of course, imagine, since this is our evening for imagining, that the sender of the radiogram had at one time been a friend, and at that time arranged and so forth, as we hypothesized before; but that still involves the idea of conspiracy and fails to explain the irony. I think we must put that hypothesis in the locker.

"Consider once more the character of the message. We have now decided that it was not a signal. I can only think of one other thing it could be, and that is: an allusion. Those particular words must have some terrible association for the captain. Yet he must have heard those words thousands of times in the last quarter century and more that he has sailed these seas, and he has not been having apoplectic fits on each occasion. It wasn't the words that frightened the birds but the 'orrible double ongtong. Anybody writing a straight message would have added a signature unless it had been some romantic girl; and if so, why the apoplexy?"

Lord Juventius cleared his throat. Simon's glance flung a dagger, and he subsided.

"No, it's clear that McVea was not expecting anything of the sort, that it dug up something hidden very deeply in his life.

"Now, how could he be sure that an anonymous communication of this harmless appearance was in reality some shocking threat to life and honour? Only because he knew just what we don't know--the nature of the allusion. The message must be from some person or group of persons to whom these words mean something terrible. One can imagine secret socieities in which they were the valdiction to a traitor--a warning that he had been found out, and that they meant to execute him. But again this does not fit in at all with what we know of the captain's character. He never had fantastic notions--he has never been mixed up with anything shady. For the purposes of the argument, we are compelled to assume that McVea is a good man, and his enemy a bad one. Considering the effect of the message, its innocence becomes positively devilish. Now a man who commands a great ship has to be absolutely stainless, financially and in every other way. He is liable to make bitter enemies--to incur deadly hatred. A brave man (however) takes all this in the day's work.