I
A man may live all his days without finding his true vocation, and it
is often accident that reveals it to him. Herschel might have ended
his days a music master only for chance, and Du Maurier towards the
finish of his life found that he had been all his life a novelist
without knowing it.
Some years ago my friend John Sargenson found on the beach near Dover
an old red satin shoe that had been washed ashore tied to a bundle of
papers. I have told the story elsewhere and how, brooding over these
things, and by powers of analysis and synthesis rarely linked in one
brain, he solved the riddle and brought a murderer to justice.
He didn’t continue in the business. He is a very rich man, and God’s
beautiful world offers him better objects of pursuit than the crook
and criminal; all the same, a year after the shoe business, accident
brought him again in touch with a problem. He took the thing up,
followed it to its solution and now he wishes he hadn’t. This is the
story as he told me it.