I pass the Hardingham ever and again and glance aside through the great
archway at the fountain and the ferns, and think of those receding days
when I was so near the centre of our eddy of greed and enterprise. I
see again my uncle’s face, white and intent, and hear him discourse,
hear him make consciously Napoleonic decisions, “grip” his nettles, put
his “finger on the spot,” “bluff,” say “snap.” He became particularly
addicted to the last idiom. Towards the end every conceivable act took
the form of saying “snap!”
The odd fish that came to us! And among others came Gordon-Nasmyth,
that queer blend of romance and illegality who was destined to drag me
into the most irrelevant adventure in my life the Mordet Island affair;
and leave me, as they say, with blood upon my hands. It is remarkable
how little it troubles my conscience and how much it stirs my
imagination, that particular memory of the life I took. The story of
Mordet Island has been told in a government report and told all wrong;
there are still excellent reasons for leaving it wrong in places, but
the liveliest appeals of discretion forbid my leaving it out
altogether.
I’ve still the vividest memory of Gordon-Nasmyth’s appearance in the
inner sanctum, a lank, sunburnt person in tweeds with a yellow-brown
hatchet face and one faded blue eye—the other was a closed and sunken
lid—and how he told us with a stiff affectation of ease his incredible
story of this great heap of quap that lay abandoned or undiscovered on
the beach behind Mordet’s Island among white dead mangroves and the
black ooze of brackish water.
“What’s quap?” said my uncle on the fourth repetition of the word.
“They call it quap, or quab, or quabb,” said Gordon-Nasmyth; “but our
relations weren’t friendly enough to get the accent right....
“But there the stuff is for the taking. They don’t know about it.
Nobody knows about it. I got down to the damned place in a canoe alone.
The boys wouldn’t come. I pretended to be botanising.” ...
To begin with, Gordon-Nasmyth was inclined to be dramatic.
“Look here,” he said when he first came in, shutting the door rather
carefully behind him as he spoke, “do you two men—yes or no—want to put
up six thousand—for—a clear good chance of fifteen hundred per cent. on
your money in a year?”
“We’re always getting chances like that,” said my uncle, cocking his
cigar offensively, wiping his glasses and tilting his chair back. “We
stick to a safe twenty.”
Gordon-Nasmyth’s quick temper showed in a slight stiffening of his
attitude.
“Don’t you believe him,” said I, getting up before he could reply.
“You’re different, and I know your books. We’re very glad you’ve come
to us. Confound it, uncle! Its Gordon-Nasmyth! Sit down. What is it?
Minerals?”
“Quap,” said Gordon-Nasmyth, fixing his eye on me, “in heaps.”
“In heaps,” said my uncle softly, with his glasses very oblique.
“You’re only fit for the grocery,” said Gordon-Nasmyth scornfully,
sitting down and helping himself to one of my uncle’s cigars. “I’m
sorry I came. But, still, now I’m here.... And first as to quap; quap,
sir, is the most radio-active stuff in the world. That’s quap! It’s a
festering mass of earths and heavy metals, polonium, radium, ythorium,
thorium, carium, and new things, too. There’s a stuff called
Xk—provisionally. There they are, mucked up together in a sort of
rotting sand. What it is, how it got made, I don’t know. It’s like as
if some young creator had been playing about there. There it lies in
two heaps, one small, one great, and the world for miles about it is
blasted and scorched and dead. You can have it for the getting. You’ve
got to take it—that’s all!”
“That sounds all right,” said I. “Have you samples?”
“Well—_should_ I? You can have anything—up to two ounces.”
“Where is it?”...
His blue eye smiled at me and scrutinised me. He smoked and was
fragmentary for a time, fending off my questions; then his story began
to piece itself together. He conjured up a vision of this strange
forgotten kink in the world’s littoral, of the long meandering channels
that spread and divaricate and spend their burden of mud and silt
within the thunderbelt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled
vegetation that creeps into the shimmering water with root and sucker.
He gave a sense of heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and
told how at last comes a break among these things, an arena fringed
with bone-white dead trees, a sight of the hard-blue sea line beyond
the dazzling surf and a wide desolation of dirty shingle and mud,
bleached and scarred.... A little way off among charred dead weeds
stands the abandoned station,—abandoned because every man who stayed
two months at that station stayed to die, eaten up mysteriously like a
leper with its dismantled sheds and its decaying pier of wormrotten and
oblique piles and planks, still insecurely possible.
And in the midst, two clumsy heaps shaped like the backs of hogs, one
small, one great, sticking out under a rib of rock that cuts the space
across,—quap!
“There it is,” said Gordon-Nasmyth, “worth three pounds an ounce, if
it’s worth a penny; two great heaps of it, rotten stuff and soft, ready
to shovel and wheel, and you may get it by the ton!”
“How did it get there?”
“God knows! ... There it is—for the taking! In a country where you
mustn’t trade. In a country where the company waits for good kind men
to find it riches and then take ’em away from ’em. There you have
it—derelict.”
“Can’t you do any sort of deal?”
“They’re too damned stupid. You’ve got to go and take it. That’s all.”
“They might catch you.”
“They might, of course. But they’re not great at catching.”
We went into the particulars of that difficulty. “They wouldn’t catch
me, because I’d sink first. Give me a yacht,” said Gordon-Nasmyth;
“that’s all I need.”
“But if you get caught,” said my uncle.
I am inclined to think Gordon-Nasmyth imagined we would give him a
cheque for six thousand pounds on the strength of his talk. It was very
good talk, but we didn’t do that. I stipulated for samples of his stuff
for analysis, and he consented—reluctantly.
I think, on the whole, he would rather I didn’t examine samples. He
made a motion pocketwards, that gave us an invincible persuasion that
he had a sample upon him, and that at the last instant he decided not
to produce it prematurely.
There was evidently a curious strain of secretiveness in him. He didn’t
like to give us samples, and he wouldn’t indicate within three hundred
miles the position of this Mordet Island of his. He had it clear in his
mind that he had a secret of immense value, and he had no idea at all
of just how far he ought to go with business people. And so presently,
to gain time for these hesitations of his, he began to talk of other
things. He talked very well. He talked of the Dutch East Indies and of
the Congo, of Portuguese East Africa and Paraguay, of Malays and rich
Chinese merchants, Dyaks and negroes and the spread of the Mahometan
world in Africa to-day. And all this time he was trying to judge if we
were good enough to trust with his adventure. Our cosy inner office
became a little place, and all our business cold and lifeless exploits
beside his glimpses of strange minglings of men, of slayings unavenged
and curious customs, of trade where no writs run, and the dark
treacheries of eastern ports and uncharted channels.
We had neither of us gone abroad except for a few vulgar raids on
Paris; our world was England, are the places of origin of half the raw
material of the goods we sold had seemed to us as remote as fairyland
or the forest of Arden. But Gordon-Nasmyth made it so real and intimate
for us that afternoon—for me, at any rate—that it seemed like something
seen and forgotten and now again remembered.
And in the end he produced his sample, a little lump of muddy clay
speckled with brownish grains, in a glass bottle wrapped about with
lead and flannel—red flannel it was, I remember—a hue which is, I know,
popularly supposed to double all the mystical efficacies of flannel.
“Don’t carry it about on you,” said Gordon-Nasmyth. “It makes a sore.”
I took the stuff to Thorold, and Thorold had the exquisite agony of
discovering two new elements in what was then a confidential analysis.
He has christened them and published since, but at the time
Gordon-Nasmyth wouldn’t hear for a moment of our publication of any
facts at all; indeed, he flew into a violent passion and abused me
mercilessly even for showing the stuff to Thorold. “I thought you were
going to analyse it yourself,” he said with the touching persuasion of
the layman that a scientific man knows and practises at the sciences.
I made some commercial inquiries, and there seemed even then much truth
in Gordon-Nasmyth’s estimate of the value of the stuff. It was before
the days of Capern’s discovery of the value of canadium and his use of
it in the Capern filament, but the cerium and thorium alone were worth
the money he extracted for the gas-mantles then in vogue. There were,
however, doubts. Indeed, there were numerous doubts. What were the
limits of the gas-mantle trade? How much thorium, not to speak of
cerium, could they take at a maximum. Suppose that quantity was high
enough to justify our shipload, came doubts in another quarter. Were
the heaps up to sample? Were they as big as he said? Was
Gordon-Nasmyth—imaginative? And if these values held, could we after
all get the stuff? It wasn’t ours. It was on forbidden ground. You see,
there were doubts of every grade and class in the way of this
adventure.
We went some way, nevertheless, in the discussion of his project,
though I think we tried his patience. Then suddenly he vanished from
London, and I saw no more of him for a year and a half.
My uncle said that was what he had expected, and when at last
Gordon-Nasmyth reappeared and mentioned in an incidental way that he
had been to Paraguay on private (and we guessed passionate) affairs,
the business of the “quap” expedition had to be begun again at the
beginning. My uncle was disposed to be altogether sceptical, but I
wasn’t so decided. I think I was drawn by its picturesque aspects. But
we neither of us dreamt of touching it seriously until Capern’s
discovery.
Nasmyth’s story had laid hold of my imagination like one small, intense
picture of tropical sunshine hung on a wall of grey business affairs. I
kept it going during Gordon-Nasmyth’s intermittent appearances in
England. Every now and then he and I would meet and reinforce its
effect. We would lunch in London, or he would cone to see my gliders at
Crest Hill, and make new projects for getting at those heaps again now
with me, now alone.
At times they became a sort of fairy-story with us, an imaginative
exercise. And there came Capern’s discovery of what he called the ideal
filament and with it an altogether less problematical quality about the
business side of quap. For the ideal filament needed five per cent. of
canadium, and canadium was known to the world only as a newly separated
constituent of a variety of the rare mineral rutile. But to Thorold it
was better known as an element in a mysterious sample brought to him by
me, and to me it was known as one of the elements in quap. I told my
uncle, and we jumped on to the process at once. We found that
Gordon-Nasmyth, still unaware of the altered value of the stuff, and
still thinking of the experimental prices of radium and the rarity
value of cerium, had got hold of a cousin named Pollack, made some
extraordinary transaction about his life insurance policy, and was
buying a brig. We put in, put down three thousand pounds, and forthwith
the life insurance transaction and the Pollack side of this finance
vanished into thin air, leaving Pollack, I regret to say, in the brig
and in the secret—except so far as canadium and the filament went—as
residuum. We discussed earnestly whether we should charter a steamer or
go on with the brig, but we decided on the brig as a less conspicuous
instrument for an enterprise that was after all, to put it plainly,
stealing.
But that was one of our last enterprises before our great crisis, and I
will tell of it in its place.
So it was quap came into our affairs, came in as a fairy-tale and
became real. More and more real it grew until at last it was real,
until at last I saw with my eyes the heaps my imagination had seen for
so long, and felt between my fingers again that half-gritty, half soft
texture of quap, like sanded moist-sugar mixed with clay in which there
stirs something—
One must feel it to understand.
V
All sorts of things came to the Hardingham and offered themselves to my
uncle. Gordon-Nasmyth stands but only because he played a part at last
in the crisis of our fortunes. So much came to us that it seemed to me
at times as though the whole world of human affairs was ready to
prostitute itself to our real and imaginary millions. As I look back, I
am still dazzled and incredulous to think of the quality of our
opportunities.
We did the most extraordinary things; things that it seems absurd to me
to leave to any casual man of wealth and enterprise who cares to do
them. I had some amazing perceptions of just how modern thought and the
supply of fact to the general mind may be controlled by money. Among
other things that my uncle offered for, he tried very hard to buy the
_British Medical Journal_ and the _Lancet_, and run them on what he
called modern lines, and when they resisted him he talked very
vigorously for a time of organising a rival enterprise. That was a very
magnificent idea indeed in its way; it would have given a tremendous
advantage in the handling of innumerable specialties and indeed I
scarcely know how far it would not have put the medical profession in
our grip. It still amazes me—I shall die amazed—that such a thing can
be possible in the modern state. If my uncle failed to bring the thing
off, some one else may succeed. But I doubt, even if he had got both
these weeklies, whether his peculiar style would have suited them. The
change of purpose would have shown. He would have found it difficult to
keep up their dignity.
He certainly did not keep up the dignity of the _Sacred Grove_, an
important critical organ which he acquired one day—by saying “snap”—for
eight hundred pounds. He got it “lock, stock and barrel”—under one or
other of which three aspects the editor was included. Even at that
price it didn’t pay. If you are a literary person you will remember the
bright new cover he gave that representative organ of British
intellectual culture, and how his sound business instincts jarred with
the exalted pretensions of a vanishing age. One old wrapper I
discovered the other day runs:—
“THE SACRED GROVE.”
_A Weekly Magazine of Art, Philosophy, Science and Belles Lettres._
HAVE YOU A NASTY TASTE IN YOUR MOUTH?
IT IS LIVER.
YOU NEED ONE TWENTY-THREE PILL.
(JUST ONE.)
NOT A DRUG BUT A LIVE AMERICAN REMEDY.