ART AND SUSPENSE
Nothing had been further from my mind than an Australian exhibition. I
cared little for the provincial approbation of the Antipodes, and I was
hardly ready for Paris--not quite yet. It was only at the reiterated
requests of friends (two of them were young Australian artists I had
known in my student days in Paris), to whom I was under real obligations
for their kindness in receiving and storing my pictures as they dribbled
into Sydney, that I finally gave consent to a public showing. In doing
this, I had stipulated particularly that they were to take all the
troubles and responsibilities of the affair, and that under no
circumstances was I to be expected to appear in person--unless, of
course, it suited my convenience and inclination at the time.
As I have said, the affair had been most intelligently handled from the
first. There had not been enough of my canvases comfortably to fill the
wing of the big New South Wales Government Museum and Art Gallery which
was available for exhibitions, but my friends, rather than pull the show
off at a less pretentious and worse lighted gallery, had added enough of
their own pictures to relieve the coldness of otherwise blank walls.
These were also South Sea marines--it was a straight seascape show
throughout,--but more or less conventional in inspiration and execution.
Benchley might have been painting marine backgrounds for an aquarium, so
faithfully did he labour to reproduce every detail of jutting coral
branches and floating seaweed. Crafts, on the other hand, had fallen
early under the influence of Turner, and persisted in bulling the yellow
ochre market by drenching his Great Barrier Reef seascapes with such a
flood of golden light as was never seen save at the head of the Adriatic
and now and then on the coasts of Tripoli and Algeria.
I would hardly characterize my own work as a compromise between these
two extremes.... It was _not_ that, though I _was_ less of a slave to
form than Benchley, and by no means so emancipated from it as Crafts.
Rather, I should say, I was striving, independent of either classic or
contemporary influence, to paint such depth, warmth and atmosphere into
my tropical seascapes as would make them convey an _intenser_ suggestion
of reality. I did not expect water spaniels to pay me the subtle
compliment of trying to gambol in my breakers, nor children to try to
launch their toy sailboats in my lagoons.... Benchley's "colour
photograph" effects were more likely to attain to those distinctions
than my comparatively impressionistic sketches. What I was striving for
was an effect that would compel some such comment as old Jackson had
made the first time he stood off and conned my "Swells and
Shells"--"Gawd bly'me, that's _it_! That water's wetter 'n a swept deck,
an', s'elp me Mike, but I c'n bloomin' near sniff them bloody clams!"
Very naturally, then, since the sea was what I was painting, the
impressions of anyone who didn't know the sea as intimately as did my
beach-combing cronies of Kai wasn't going to worry me much. The opinions
of men who knew less about the subject of my pictures, and more about
how pictures in general were painted, didn't strike me as anything that
counted very seriously. Nevertheless when, at Brisbane on the voyage
south, I got the Sydney papers with the account of the opening of the
show, it was a good deal of a satisfaction to find that my work appeared
to have got over with the art critics. These had, of course (since they
were denied Jackson's facility of expression), to confine themselves to
the jargon of their kind. It was plain, however, that they had been
favourably impressed, and were doing the best they could with their
comparatively restricted vocabularies. Mere city dwellers, too, most of
them, one had to allow for their limited capacity of appreciation for
something--the sea--which they knew only from other pictures. But even
allowing for that, it was reassuring to find that they were coming
across so whole-heartedly. Such capsules of praise as they had in stock
were scattered with lavish hands for whoso would to swallow. "The soul
of the sea palpitates through every canvas," said the _Herald_; "you
leave the gallery with the tang of blown brine fresh in your nostrils,"
said the _Telegraph_; "Australia is honoured with having the first
chance to see this brilliantly distinctive work," said the illustrated
_Australasian_, and promised four full pages of reproductions of the
"gems of the collection" in its next issue. The young lady (I judged she
was young) who was on the job for the Melbourne _Age_ gushed
breathlessly for a column and a half. This was a sample: "In
'Mother-of-Pearl' he has woven with a warp of sunbeams and a woof of
rainbow--a shimmering brocade of exultantly sentient brightness!"
Capsules of praise, every one of these; but they were from the top shelf
beyond a doubt, and the fact that they had been reached for indicated
that at least something of my message had dribbled over the frames.
The _Bulletin_ had done rather better than the others in commissioning
for the occasion an "art critic" who (as transpired in the course of his
half-page article) had sailed his own sixty-footer to Auckland and back.
He, at least, had met the sea on more intimate terms than was possible
through Sunday mixed-bathing at Coogee and Manley (with occasional
ferryboat passages, about the limit the others had gone, I reckoned).
Said he, in speaking of "The Seventh Son of a Seventh Son": "The beat of
the eternal sea was behind every slash of the brush with which this
Franco-American wizard of light and colour painted that rolling mountain
of water. I felt my fingers involuntarily clutching at the spokes of the
wheel to bring her up to meet the menace of that curling crest. I forgot
where I was ... I almost felt the heave of a deck beneath my feet...."
I rather liked that, I must confess; though perhaps it didn't give me
quite the double-barrelled thrill of "Heifer" Halligan's comment when I
sent for him to pass judgment on that same picture before the paint of
my finishing touches upon it was dry. A month before, as I have already
mentioned, I had given the "Heifer" a pretty severe pummelling with the
four-ounce gloves, and, like the good sport he was, to show that there
was no hard feeling on the score of his battered optics, he had
volunteered to sail me in his sloop to Tuka-tuva (the reef on which Bell
lost the _Flying Scud_, it may be recalled) so that I could make some
close-range studies of hard-running waves at the point of breaking. And,
just to show that there was no hard feeling on _my_ part over the wallop
below my belt with which the "Heifer" had finally brought the bout to a
close, I accepted. The studies had been made--just a few slashes on
oil-cloth with a rather useful waterproof paint I had mixed specially
for "sloppy" stunts like that--with my shivering anatomy lashed to the
_Wet-Eyed Susy's_ bowsprit, while the "Heifer" tacked back and forth
just beyond the line where the pull of the shoaling reef, dragging at
their bases, let the green-black tops of the combers tumble over in a
thunderous roar. As he was really taking a good deal of a chance of
losing his handy little pearler, if nothing else, it was only right that
the "Heifer's" request for a first look-see at the completed picture
should have the call.
He studied it in silence for a minute or two, legs wide apart and his
bullet head cocked judicially to one side. Then his fine teeth were
bared in a broad grin and he vented a throaty chuckle of amused
admiration. Said he: "Mister Whitney, that hulkin' ol' lalapalooser
there looks like he has all the kick behint him of that bally wallop on
the solar plexus you floored me with the other day." Not even the Sydney
_Bulletin's dilletante_ yachtsman could do quite as well as that--from
my standpoint, at least. But of course I had a weakness for the Kai
viewpoint.
The Exhibition had been opened early in the week--the usual affair of
the kind, "Under the Patronage and in the Presence of His Excellency,
the Governor General and Lady X----," and a long list of specially
invited guests. Amiable old Lord X---- had made one of the happy little
speeches for which he was famous. Then they had all had tea and a look
at the pictures. This inevitable formal session out of the way, the show
was opened to the general public. Under the stimulus of the
astonishingly enthusiastic press, the public had come through beyond all
expectations. For the next three days the crush at the gallery was, as
the _Bulletin_ had it, like a "bargain day rush at _Morden's_." On
Friday, it was advertised, Sir Joseph Preston, R.A., a very
distinguished English artist visiting in Australia, had consented to
speak at the Exhibition on "The Painter with the New Method and the New
Message." This was the day of my arrival in Sydney. It did not occur to
me at first just who the subject of the discourse was to be. When it
finally came home to me, I began speeding up my transformation process
at once. By dint of rushed valeting and dressing, I just managed to
reach the gallery as Sir Joseph was getting under way.
I won't endeavour to set down his speech, not even in outline. It was
highly complimentary from first to last--and not even condescending,
which was as surprising as pleasing when one considered how lofty an
eminence Sir Joseph occupied in the art world. One thing I was just a
bit disappointed about, though, was that the speaker seemed to assume
that the pictures on exhibition represented my ultimate expression, the
best I could do, or could be expected to do; whereas I knew that I had
hardly got my foot well planted on the first rung of the ladder. I
regretted without resenting this. I hadn't painted my hopes and
ambitions into the pictures, so how was Sir Joseph Preston, more than
anybody else, to see what I was driving at? I rather wanted to tell him
about it, though. I hadn't talked with an artist of the old boy's
calibre since I was in Paris, and not often there.
I was just screwing up my nerve to push in and introduce myself, when
Benchley pounced upon me with a joyous whoop and did the thing as a
matter of course. Totally oblivious of the widening circle of wondering
cackle that arose as the news of my unexpected, and not undramatic,
appearance spread outward through the jam, I held forth to the beaming
Royal Academician on the things that had been passing through my mind.
The great man fired as though he had been of tow and my words--my
ideas--were a torch laid to the inflammable mass of him.
"Magnificent! Perfectly ripping!" he exclaimed with enthusiasm; "but
what a shame I didn't know that ten minutes ago so that I could have
told them! By Jove, I'll tell them now! Better yet--jolly good idea;
_you_ tell them. Just the things you've been telling me."
Benchley, Crafts and my other sponsors descended upon me like a pack of
hounds at those words, and the first thing I knew I had been hustled up
onto their little dais, and Sir Joseph was introducing me as "a
gentleman who can make a few pertinent additions to my late remarks."
I hadn't been called upon for a speech since I won the middle-weight
boxing championship of Harvard in my Junior year, and speaking was by no
means my long suit even in those days. I bucked up and went through it
now though, just as I did on that first occasion. It's no very difficult
thing to get away with when you know what you want to say--and have the
crowd with you. I spoke briefly, but very earnestly--very much to the
point, too, I think. When the crowd had quieted down a bit, tea was
served. The next morning, when I read the papers in bed, it was to
discover that I had become a fully fledged--or perhaps maned is the
proper word--lion.
In one of those same papers there was an interesting item of news about
another lion. The special representative the _Herald_ had rushed to
Townsville immediately the news of the _Cora Andrews_ affair had been
received, wired that the Hon. Hartley Allen, replying from the
Quarantine Station to a note the correspondent had addressed him there,
announced definitely that it was his intention to pay a visit to his old
home town of Sydney. He would leave by the first steamer sailing after
the doctors had certified him free of the danger of plague infection.
That was good news. The best I could have hoped for. It confirmed my
growing belief that I was not going to have to do much, if any, seeking
in order to meet my man. And it was a hundred to one that the doctor
with whom I had talked on the _Utupua_ had told Allen of the
conversation as soon as the latter came out of his long sleep, I was
even inclined to the opinion that his decision to go south as soon as he
could had been influenced by a desire to find out once and for all what
attitude I was going to take toward him. This was all to the good. There
was no need of my hurrying back to Townsville now. I could stay in
Sydney and enjoy my triumph while watching that of the Hon. Hartley
Allen develop. With a lighter heart than I had known since the rumble of
the _Cora's_ anchor chain awakened me on that day of hateful memory in
Kai, I tumbled out of bed, took a cold bath, and went down to the
dining-room for breakfast--the greatest burst of early matutinal energy
I had shown in years.
The avidity of the interest of the public in the Hon. Hartley Allen
increased day by day as the time approached for the hero to come south.
All of the important papers had special men on the job in Townsville,
and every scrap of news bearing the least relation to the man of the
hour was instantly put on the wires and rushed into print. Save for that
one announcement that he intended visiting Sydney, Allen himself gave
out nothing. The correspondents had to confine themselves to reports of
his continued improvement in health, as passed out to them by the
doctors, and to speculation--columns of it--as to what effect Allen's
return might be expected to have upon racing. His elder brother--Sir
James, who was now in England--had allowed Hartley's stable to run down
a good deal after the latter had been shipped off to the Islands. There
were a few good horses left after the best of the string had been sold
to pay off debts, and these would form a nucleus which could not fail to
develop quickly into a factor to be reckoned with in the meets of next
season. There was no limit to the discussion of this phase of the
affair, Melbourne and Sydney racing experts devoting even more space to
it than the special men in Townsville.
Of the story of the _Cora Andrews_ there was nothing new whatever being
brought out. If Allen was telling the doctors at the Quarantine Station
anything, it must have been in confidence, for these professed to have
learned nothing further every time the correspondents pressed them for
details. The schooner herself, it was reported, had broken from her
mooring during a gale and been driven upon the beach of Cleveland Bay,
some miles from the town. A hole had been stove in her bow and it would
be impossible to get her off before considerable repairs were carried
out. As she had not been disinfected since the removal of the plague
victims, there would probably be some delay about the repairs,
especially as the question of her ownership was in doubt. She had
belonged to the man who sailed her in the labour-recruiting trade, and
he was dead. So was the Skipper who had taken her over in the
Louisiades. It looked like the Hon. Hartley Allen had the most valid
claim to her, but that was a matter to be adjusted by the courts in any
event. In the meantime, the schooner, as she was lying in fairly quiet
water, was probably safe until the next gale. Thus the papers.
When Allen finally came out of quarantine it transpired that he would
have a wait of three days on his hands before there was a steamer
departing for the south. The delay was unavoidable, although an
enthusiastic Sydney paper had suggested that the Admiral commanding the
Australian Naval Station should detach a gunboat to bring the hero home.
Allen, it appeared, had actually tried to avoid meeting the newspaper
men, and consented to do so finally only on the condition that he would
not be expected to give out anything in the way of an interview in
respect to his past, present or future. As they had no alternative in
the matter, the correspondents accepted the ultimatum, but only--as most
of them confessed--in the hope of getting it modified when action was
joined. They were doomed to disappointment.
Allen received them on the veranda of a house that had been put at his
disposal by a prominent local shipping man--a detached bungalow in the
grounds of the latter's home on the outskirts of the town. They reported
him looking rather soft--a good two stone heavier than his former riding
weight. He was heavily browned from the tropical sun, showed a tinge of
yellow--doubtless from malaria and _dengue_,--and his face was deeply
lined about the eyes and mouth. He looked to have aged rather more than
the five years of his absence: but life in the Islands was hardly the
rest cure most Australians fancied it. No, not by a long shot.
Except for his refusal to tell anything whatever of the story of how he
had brought the plague ship through the Great Barrier Reef, Allen had
been very courteous and agreeable to the pressmen. They all agreed that
he was in good fettle--quite full of beans. Indeed, it was Allen who did
all of the interviewing. Persistently refusing to answer any questions
about himself, he was avid of interest concerning all that had happened
in the racing world during his absence. What were the real facts behind
the breakdown of the Colchester filly after she had won the Victoria
National so handily? Who was that colt _Ballarat Boy_ out of?--the one
that had upset all the dope in the spring meet at Adelaide. Were Tod
Sloan and Skeets Martin still piling up wins in England? What was the
secret of their success? Was there any chance of these or any other of
the Yank jockeys coming to Australia?
Answering such questions as these for an hour was the way that bunch of
high-salaried feature writers interviewed the Hon. Hartley Allen. And
when, as one of them put it in somewhat mixed simile, they were "pumped
dry as a last year's dope sheet," the hero announced that the interview
was over.
Disappointed in their endeavours to pry any pearls from the oyster
into which Allen (for reasons best known to himself) had metamorphosed
himself, the correspondents made the best of a bad job by playing up
the modesty of the man they had been sent a thousand miles or so to
interview. Modest was an adjective that--in the light of what most of
them knew of Allen's past--it hadn't occurred to any of them to use
before. Now, however, they made up for lost time. The modest hero did
this, or the modest hero said that.... There was modesty in the way he
stroked his chin, in the shrug of his shoulders, in the way he crossed
and uncrossed his legs when sitting. His habit of looking sideways
when speaking was rated as a sign of modesty; so was the trick of
stroking his cheroot between thumb and forefinger as he smoked.
_Modest_--_hero_--those words became permanently wedded in my mind
during the week that I was reading leaders written with them for an
inspiration, the report of sermons preached with them as a text. I
cannot hear the one of them to this day without thinking of the other.
_Modest hero!_ In the estimation of the public "Slant" Allen, whom I had
always thought of as the most egotistic man I had ever known, remained
that to the--until public estimation ceased to interest him.
There was one little item of news telegraphed from Townsville which I
read with a good deal of grim amusement. The day before his departure
Allen was given some kind of a send-off in the Town Hall. As he was
riding down the main street on his way to this affair, a man ducked
under the rope holding the crowd back at the curb, rushed at the open
carriage and aimed a blow at the breast of the hero with a knife. No
whit perturbed, the latter had coolly deflected the thrust by striking
up the assailant's elbow with his left hand. Then, seizing the ruffian's
wrist with his right hand, he had brought it sharply down on the edge of
the carriage door, shattering the bones and causing the knife to fall
from the relaxed fingers to the pavement. Infuriated by the dastardly
attack, the crowd had set upon the would-be assassin, who was only saved
from being mauled to death through the interference of none other than
Allen himself.
The correspondents were much impressed, not only by the behaviour of the
generous-hearted hero in intervening to save the life of the man who had
just tried to take his own, but also--and especially--by a curious
little circumstance in connection therewith. It was observed, in short,
that, while Allen had defended his own body most effectually with his
bare hands, as soon as he saw that the man who had attacked him was on
the verge of being killed by a bloody-minded mob, quite beyond police
control, he whipped out a revolver and used the menace of it to clear a
space around the trampled body of his late assailant. The correspondents
all thought that was rather fine; indeed, I was inclined to think so
myself.
Allen had flatly refused to lodge a complaint against the man who had
tried so desperately to knife him, and even declined to help the police
in their attempt to identify the fellow. "Just an old Island affair, the
big-hearted hero had explained with a careless laugh, as he turned on
his way to receive the Golden Key symbolizing the Freedom of the Queen
City of Northern Queensland." That was the way the _Herald_ man had it.
At the Police Station the prisoner was recognized at once as a man named
Saunders, who had been convicted of a series of bullion robberies in the
Kalgoorlie gold fields of Western Australia some years previously.
Because of his diabolical practice of throwing red pepper and vitriol to
blind his victims, he had gained the sobriquet of "The Squid." He had
escaped after serving but eighteen months of his twenty-five-year
sentence and made his way across the "Never-Never" to Port Darwin, where
all trace of him was lost for the time. He was supposed to have slipped
away to the Islands. This was confirmed a few months later, when a
boatload of out-bound placer miners were held up and robbed of the
fruits of their season's work in the Fly gold fields of New Guinea. Even
if one of them, who had once been in Western Australia, had not
identified Saunders, the fact that a jar of sulphuric acid had been
thrown into the midst of the miners would have connected "The Squid"
with the crime beyond a doubt. Australia had but fragmentary record of
his later crimes, but he was known to have been mixed up in a number of
pearl robberies in and about Thursday Island. He had continued to
practise his vitriol-throwing trick (varying it occasionally with a
fiendishly original stunt with some native concoction), and was still
known as "The Squid." How long he had been lying low in Australia, or
why he ventured there, he refused to tell; neither would he offer any
explanation of his savage attack upon the hero of the hour. All he had
said in the latter connection was: "'Slant' 'll twig why I took a flyer
at returning the pig-sticker to him--it was his onct."
I understood at once that the root of "The Squid's" grudge against Allen
struck back to that affair of the old pearl pirate's missionary-reared
daughter--a copper-haired, ivory-browed Amazon of a girl who had become
one of the most consummate sirens in the pearleries after a three-months
trip with "Slant" to Singapore had broken her in. Amazing story the
whole thing, from its beginning with the girl's mother--a teacher in the
Gospel Propaganda Society's school at Thursday Island who had fallen
afoul of one of "The Squid's" tentacles long before his conviction--to
its ghastly finish, when the girl herself settled her accumulated
account against all mankind with the body and soul of one--a hot-headed
lump of a young missionary just out from London.
According to the version current in Kai, Allen had not been greatly to
blame in the affair with the temperamental rack of bones and red braids
that the girl was when she burst upon the Islands from the Auckland
convent; but "The Squid" evidently felt that the man who had set the
snowball (not a very apt metaphor, for I never heard the girl compared
to anything so frigid) rolling was the one to settle with. I had heard
of three or four rather ingeniously thought-out attempts he had made to
square the account, all of which, however, had failed as a consequence
of Allen's quickness of wit and hand in sudden emergency. The knife
figuring in the Townsville attack, it occurred to me, was probably the
one the resourceful "Slant" had put through "The Squid's" shoulder at
twenty paces a fraction of a second before the latter had delivered a
flask of red pepper from his upraised hand.
I also thought I understood why Allen had bluntly refused to make any
explanation of the attack. A veritable Turk in his relations with women,
that Island Lothario had also the Turk's dislike for discussing his
women in public. When sober, Allen rarely if ever boasted about
anything. When very drunk, he would occasionally toot a horn anent his
racing wins; and once, when he was all but swamped--awash to the rails
with "Three Star"--I had heard him give a maudlin monologue on men he
had put away. But I--and no one else, so far as I knew--had ever heard
him talk of the girls he had bagged, though the Lord knows there had
been enough of them. (The nearest he ever came to it was in that little
joke of his I have mentioned--the one about having "a son and a saddle
in every island group in the South Pacific,"--and that was only a sort
of delicate implication.) His close-mouthedness about women was one of a
number of little things I couldn't help but liking in the rascal.
Since Allen and Saunders would not talk, and since the knife that
figured in the affair--a heavy dirk, with a shark's hide handle and the
mark of a Lisbon cutlerer on the blade--could not talk, the ever-baffled
Townsville correspondents had been able to gather practically nothing
about what their journalistic noses told them was a red-hot human
interest story. Blocked on that trail, they devoted a lot of space to a
discussion of the interesting revelation of the hero's Island nickname.
More or less ingenious theories as to "Why 'Slant'?" filled the columns
of the papers for a number of days. None of them was within a mile of
the mark. One of the correspondents fancied the name had been given
Allen because of his "aquilinity, his wiry slenderness, so that he clove
the air like a slant of sunbeams as he rode." Another writer was sure
the name was suggested by the hero's peculiar crouching seat--the slant
of his back as he urged on his mount. They were quite incapable of going
beyond Allen's physical characteristics, or of visualizing him save on
horseback.
That added another little item to the list of things I could have
enlightened the press and the public on about "Slant" Allen, and, in
this particular instance, I wouldn't have minded passing on the facts at
once. Indeed, I made rather a hit at a Government House luncheon one day
by telling how the nearing hero (he was expected to be landing at
Brisbane on the morrow) had qualified for his queer nickname. Jackson,
who was responsible for the title, had confided to me how he came to
bestow it. There was no story behind it, as some of the papers had
hinted. Old "Jack," after having known Allen pretty intimately for a
couple of years, came to the conclusion one day that the lanky
Sydney-sider was the first man he ever met who persistently and
consistently kept him guessing. Given a situation, and the foxy old
highwayman had discovered that he could usually tell in advance how any
given man would be likely to meet it. It was after he had guessed wrong
about Allen some dozens of times, without once guessing right, that
Jackson made up his mind that there was no forecasting the "slant of his
course from the slant of the breeze." And because something in the
mellifluous sound of the word struck pleasantly on the trader's ear, he
began applying the name to the man who had inspired it. "No re'l reason
for it," he explained; "but it sure do seem to fit 'im like a new copper
bottom does a schooner."
The Governor General's Aide-de-camp, who was something of a follower of
the ponies, confirmed Jackson's opinion and the fitness of the
sobriquet. Said the gaily uniformed "Galloper": "The great secret of
Allen's astonishing success as a point-to-point rider was his amazing
faculty for bringing off the unexpected. Once, at Launceston, I saw him
win on a hundred-to-one shot (how he happened to be riding the skate I
don't know) by deliberately bolting the course and putting his mount
full tilt through a thorn thicket. He was in tenth place, with a mile to
go when he did it, and he won the race by a dozen lengths--his own and
the waler's hide in tatters.
"Another unexpected win of Allen's," he continued with the wry grin of a
man who speaks of dearly bought experience, "was that 'Totalisator' coup
of his at Adelaide. His pals got in on the 'Tote' somehow, and--" A
warning cough from Lord X---- checked the loquacious "Galloper's" tongue
in mid-flight, and, with reddening gill, he faded away with: "Sorry,
sir, but I forgot it isn't quite--quite the thing to remember that
little chapter of Hartley Allen's past. Quite right, really. My mistake.
Dead sorry, sir...."
There was no doubt that Allen was going to have a clean-scored slate to
begin writing anew on. I was thinking of that, and "Why 'Slant'?", as I
walked back to the hotel an hour later. "No forecasting the slant of his
course from the slant of the breeze!"... "Faculty for bringing off the
unexpected." I hoped that he wasn't going to disappoint me in the matter
of bringing things to a showdown on his arrival in Sydney. But no.... My
every instinct told me that he would not side-step that. So I made all
preparations properly to receive "Slant" Allen, and, on the day of his
triumphant home-coming, was waiting for him in my room at the
_Australia_, as I have already told.