THE FACE
The Chief of Police's allusion to the picture had started a nebulous
idea in my head, but it took it several hours to crystallize. Driving
alone up the hill, my mind gravitated dully to the matter of the
identity of the perpetrator of the unspeakable outrage. I found myself
speculating as to whether or not the Chief of Police, had he known of
Rona's previous attacks upon Allen, would have been as ready as he was
to attribute the guilt to "Squid" Saunders. And would he--had he known
of them--been able to trace any connection between Rona's repeated
attempts to induce Allen to go off to the schooner with her and the fact
that the crime had been committed there? And didn't it look just a
little as though Rona's whole strange plan for having a picture painted
was only a subterfuge to open the way for a carefully plotted revenge?
And yet, if she had done all this, she surely must have had--or thought
she had--a good reason for doing it. But had not Oakes established a
clear alibi for the girl when he met her "away inland" the same
afternoon men had been reported to have been seen on the schooner?
Probably, but not certainly. Oakes himself had said that she was "a
great walker" and "very restless."
It was conceivable that the girl might have doubled back and waylaid
Allen on the road. Or perhaps she had met him by appointment. He had
admitted that he was becoming increasingly subject to her will. But how
could she have induced him to go off to the schooner, and how had they
gone? No boat had been sighted along the beach (we had looked for one
through Butler's glasses on our return to the landing), and none was
reported missing from the harbour. The Chief had inquired on that latter
point while we were with him at the Station.
And how had Rona, or anyone else for that matter, been able to get the
better of such a man as Allen, fully armed and on the alert as I knew
him to have been, and noted for his resourcefulness in emergency? That
train of thought reminded me that we had found no arms on Allen when we
released him. His right coat-pocket was empty, and so was the
knife-sheath on his right hip. But his pocketbook, containing a
considerable amount in notes, had not been taken.... It was all too much
for my tired brain, which, ready enough to suggest questions, was quite
incapable of grappling with them. When I drove into the home clearing I
was wondering whether the broken glass I had noticed in the bottom of
the cockpit was that from the whisky bottle Allen had told me Rona had
thrown at him the morning Bell gave up the fight.
I was horribly tired, both in mind and body, and hoped that, with a
glass or two of absinthe to relax my nerves, I might be able to sleep at
least through the heat of the noonday. Shifting into my pajamas,--after
telling Suey, my China boy, that I would not want lunch and not to
disturb me until I sent for him,--I crawled under the mosquito-net and
tried to drop off. But it was no use. No sooner would I begin to doze
than the expiring images of my thoughts would shuffle up and sharpen
with a steel-clicking suddenness into the dread likeness of The Face,
with its dilated eyes boring me to the spine.
At the end of a couple of hours of fevered tossing, I gave it up, threw
off my pajamas, stepped to the low back-window ledge and took a header
into the cool green pool below. The Face dissolved as the thrill of the
refreshing embrace of the water ran through my blood, but only to return
when, after donning a fresh suit of drills, I began a restless pacing of
the floor of the big living-room--my studio. Always it flashed a pace or
two ahead of me, floating backward as I advanced upon it and swinging
with me at the end of the room. I could not wheel swiftly enough to lose
it, and it made no difference whether my eyes were opened or closed. I
tried it both ways.
It was in the course of an experimental lap I was trying with my hands
over my eyes that I bumped into the big rectangle of canvas I had
prepared in advance against the day I should be ready to start work on
"The Saving of the Black-birder." Ten seconds later I was pawing over my
colours with feverish haste. The idea swimming in my head had
crystallized. It was, in effect: _Put The Face on canvas and it will
cease to haunt and harrow your mind_. That sounded reasonable. Certainly
The Face couldn't be in two places at once, and if I once got it
anchored to the canvas I could cover it up when I wanted to get away
from it. It would all depend upon how faithfully I did my work,
something told me. If the face on the canvas was a replica of the other
to a hair, to a line, to the fear in the hell-haunted eyes, then the
phantom face would enter into it and become subject to my control. If
not--then I would never know sleep nor peace while I continued to live.
No artist can ever have approached a task under empire of the flaming
intensity I threw into this one. I was painting to save my reason,
perhaps my life. That is not a figure of speech. I mean it quite
literally, for I am convinced to this day that I stumbled upon the only
path that would have led me clear of complete mental and physical
collapse.
There was a rather remarkable coincidence in connection with the way I
started to work. Nothing told me that those first nervous slashes of my
brush signalized the beginning of a picture the fame of which was
destined to reach the outposts of the civilized world before the year
was out. All thought of "The Black-birder" was erased from my mind. I
had no idea of a picture in my head. I was not even beginning to work
upon a figure. I was only conscious that I was going to put all I had
into the task of reproducing--recreating, if that were possible--with
coloured pigments a phantom of my brain--a face--The Face.
I had no thought, I say, of beginning a picture. I sketched nothing in,
not even the outline of the haunting shadow I was going to try to
capture. A very few minutes after I began squeezing out colours onto my
palette I was smearing them upon a patch of the big six-feet-by-ten
expanse of woven cotton in front of me. The coincidence I have mentioned
became apparent some weeks later, when I discovered that, of all the
sixty square feet of canvas before me, the something less than one
square foot upon which I concentrated my paint and energies for the next
thirty hours chanced to be in exactly the place it _had_ to be for the
result of my effort to assume its proper place in a somewhat intricate
composition. I will tell of that in due course.
Save for the strain of the terrible tension under which I worked, the
task to which I had set myself proved absolutely the simplest I ever
attempted. It seemed that I could not go wrong. It was not like painting
a face from memory, nor yet like painting one from a model. It was more
like colouring a photograph, for the image, terrible as life, was right
there on the canvas at the end of my arm. At first, as I tried to
visualize it at shorter range than the five or six feet at which it had
been floating, it was a bit hazy; but presently my intense concentration
of mind had its reward. The dreadful phantom drew nearer, increased in
detail, and finally sharpened into clear focus at the tip of my brush.
After that I became just a meticulously faithful retoucher, working in a
trance.
It was toward the middle of the afternoon when Suey came in to ask if I
was going to be home for dinner. He was becoming used to my queer ways,
and, when I failed to take any notice of his reiterated query, came over
and touched me on the shoulder. I "came out" with a start, but gathered
my wits quickly. I told Suey that I should probably be working steadily
for the next day or two and would want nothing to eat until I was
finished. If he would bring me a bowl of cracked ice every hour and see
that no one was allowed in to bother me, it would be all I should want
of him. He replied with a laconic "Can do," and backed out toward the
kitchen as though I had asked for curry-and-rice for dinner, or ordered
something else equally rational and matter-of-fact.
I settled back into my spell of tranced concentration with scarcely an
effort, working swiftly and surely, with never a pause. The "drawing"
was all done for me, and even in the matter of colours there was no
hesitation. Exactly the proper shade or tint drew my brush like a
magnet; and always it was applied with telling effect.
The sunset shadows of the western hills were driving their black wedges
across the satiny sheen of the light-flickering levels of the waving
sugar-cane when I became aware that a sound I had been conscious of for
some time had suddenly changed and intensified. If my mind had tried to
catalogue the clear notes that had been floating in through the north
window, it was probably to credit them to a certain bell-bird friend of
mine who was in the habit of ringing his vesper chimes from a leafy
chapel in the big bottle tree toward the end of the afternoon. But there
was nothing bird-like in the quick staccato of eager yelps that had been
responsible for bringing me, with ears and interest a-cock, out of my
trance. "Dogs closing in for a kill," I muttered to myself, realizing
that it had been the distant baying of hounds on a hot scent that I had
confused with the more imminent chiming of my Austral bell-ringing
neighbour. The sounds came from a long way off--probably from somewhere
in the dense bush beyond the farther borders of the cane fields. It was
a northerly hauling of the wind that brought them down to me so clearly.
The air had been charged and electric all day, and the breaking up of
the trade wind indicated that a hurricane was mustering its forces
somewhere up among the Islands. I had not looked at the barometer on the
veranda, but knew that it must be registering a considerable fall.
The crack of a single shot drifted down the wind as the yelping reached
its climax. Then all was quiet in the distance, with only an occasional
cackling guffaw of a "laughing jackass" ripping across the silence that
brooded nearer at hand. I didn't know what there was to hunt in that
particular neck of Queensland, but thought it might be kangaroos or
dingoes. It wasn't of enough interest to waste time in speculating upon
it, just then in any event.
Daylight had given way to twilight, and twilight to moonlight, before I
stopped work again, this time to respond to an insistent ringing of the
telephone bell. Oakes' deep voice came excitedly over the wire. "I
thought you would be interested to know that Rawdon's dogs tracked down
'Squid' Saunders this afternoon," it said. "He has just been brought in.
Bullet through his shoulder, but not a serious wound. The report went
around that he had confessed to the attack on Hartley Allen, and the
town went wild. Only the Chief's nerve prevented a lynching, and there
may be trouble yet. Never saw the people so excited." In response to my
inquiry about Allen, Oakes said that he had been drugged to sleep early
in the afternoon, and that there was no use trying to forecast what turn
things would take until he came out.
"That clears Rona, at any rate," was my thought as I drained a glass of
iced absinthe and picked up my brush again. I found it just a shade
harder materializing The Face than it had been at first, but managed it
at the end of a minute or two of close concentration. Save for an
occasional pause for a sip of absinthe, I worked steadily on through the
night.
* * * * *
To make clear what transpired the following day, it will be well to set
down at this point a few things which I only learned in a conversation
with the Chief of Police after the last act of the drama was played to a
finish and the curtain rung down. Contrary to the understanding of Dr.
Oakes, and all the rest of the people of Townsville with the exception
of the Chief of Police and a couple of his assistants, "Squid" Saunders
had _not_ confessed. From what he _had_ said in the presence of all his
captors, however, it was easy to see how the story had originated. He
admitted quite freely to Rawdon, after the latter had called off his
dogs and was lending a hand to plug up the puncture in "Squid's"
shoulder, that his one purpose in returning had been to settle his
account with "Slant" Allen. He also said that he would rather be strung
up straightaway than to be sent back to West Australia and begin, at
sixty, serving out a twenty-odd-year sentence.
That was about all Saunders said at the time of his capture, but later,
after expressing himself to the Chief of Police to similar effect, he
went a little further. He averred frankly that curiosity had always been
one of his most pronounced characteristics, and, while he entertained
only the kindliest feelings for whoever it was that had been responsible
for tying up "Slant" Allen and leaving him alone to meditate upon his
past, he couldn't help wondering about the identity of a man able to
pull off such a cleverly thought-out and executed piece of business.
Might he not suggest to the Chief that the latter try to find some
trifle that this bright-minded and quick-handed cove had left behind on
the schooner, and see if those sharp-nosed--yes, and sharp-teethed--dogs
of his couldn't be put on the owner's trail. They appeared a very likely
lot of hounds, especially that big black-and-tan brute with a chewed
ear, who had broken away from the ruck and fastened his teeth in the
"Squid's" calf.
This all struck the straightforward, open-minded Chief as entirely
reasonable. It was only fair to Saunders, too, and since saving him from
the mob that afternoon the Chief had come to take a sort of proprietary
interest in his prisoner. Going off to the schooner in the morning he
found a small fragment of red rag in the cockpit, which, though it was
greasy and dirty, did not show signs of exposure to the weather, and
must, therefore, have been left comparatively recently. It was a
six-by-eight-inch piece of flowered red calico, of the kind used by the
natives of all parts of the South Seas for waist-cloths. Even if he
wasn't able to locate the particular _sulu_ from which it was torn, the
Chief reckoned that it would give the dogs something to go by.
Rawdon's "nigger-chasers" were of a foxhound-bloodhound cross that the
old ex-bushranger had bred especially for the purpose of chivvying down
runaway blacks from the sugar plantations. The swart sextette displayed
a very encouraging interest in the greasy rag the Chief brought them to
sniff; so much so, indeed, that they were far from drained of enthusiasm
at the end of a bootless day's nosing up and down the coast for tracks
that gave back the same ingratiating aroma. It looked quite good enough
to warrant going on with the game the following morning, Rawdon
pronounced, as he started back on foot for his kennels on the southwest
outskirts of town. (The old chap had some kind of a theory about its
being destructive to a hound's keeness to tote him around on wheels:
also, he had stumbled upon many trails where he least expected them,
even in the town.)
Rawdon was striding a couple of blocks ahead of his two helpers when,
crossing the town end of the main westerly highway to the hills, the dog
he was holding in leash--the big black-and-tan with the chewed ear, by
far his keenest-nosed hound--broke away and set off up the side of the
road in full cry. As there was no hope of trying to overtake him on
foot, Rawdon waited for the other dogs to come up and catch the scent,
cautioning his men to hold them well in leash and not to hurry until he
rejoined them. Then he ran back a quarter of a mile to the Police
Station to summon the Chief and get a horse.
This was about seven o'clock in the evening of Wednesday, the day after
we had found Hartley Allen bound to the wheel of the _Cora Andrews_.
* * * * *
At the moment the big black-and-tan hound tore his leash out of Rawdon's
hand and started to burn up the footpath beside the westerly hill road,
I had been streaking a small patch of canvas with coloured pigments for
something like thirty hours in a desperate endeavour to drive a phantom
out of my brain. I was near to the end of my labours and--I could sense
it already--close to victory. I had made a hard fight for it and I
deserved to win. Using absinthe sparingly--as a fuel and a food rather
than as a stimulant--and drawing upon my nerves for everything the drug
would not provide, I had kept going steadily and was finishing strong.
There had been but one interruption since the night before. Early in the
forenoon Captain "Choppy" Tancred had called up to say that he had
brought his new command to anchor in the harbour the previous evening,
and that, as he had a good twenty-four hours' loading to do, he hoped
that we could find time to foregather for a bit of a yarn in the course
of the day. Would I come down and have lunch with him at the hotel, or
would he drive up to me? He would rather prefer the former, as the
barometer was down and he ought to remain where he could get off to his
ship in a hurry if it came on to blow. I made the best excuse my
wandering wits could frame, and hung up. The old boy's voluble protests
were still clicking in the receiver as I returned it to its hook.
I had a hard time materializing my "model" again after that break, and
it was fifteen or twenty minutes before I was sure enough of it to
resume work. For a while, in the back of my brain, there was a flutter
of apprehension that old "Choppy" would take it into his head to come up
anyhow, and I was desperately afraid that I might not be able to
"connect" again after another interruption--that I would fail to focus
The Face at the one moment of all when I most needed it. There would
have been comfort in that thought twenty-four hours earlier, but by now
a desire to finish the portrait for its own sake seemed to have entered
into me.
But my fears were groundless. "Choppy" was properly rebuffed, and had no
intention of poking in where he "wasna weelcom'." (He told me so himself
later.) There was no further interruption, save the negligible one of
Suey and the cracked ice, sharp on every hour. As the sunset faded and
the twilight flooded the valley with luminous purple mist, I was
finished--or nearly finished. The Face was all but complete on the
canvas now, and all but erased from my brain. It had taken an intense
effort of concentration to hold it while I put the last touch on that
writhen lip, as it curled back in a snarl from the bared teeth. But I
did it. And now--just a stroke in that whorl of iris to accentuate the
abnormal dilation, to fix the horror in that ghastly stare! Slowly the
image sharpened in my brain. Again the fear-haunted eyes held my own.
Now! I was just darting my delicately poised brush forward when the
sound of voices from the veranda arrested the colour-daubed tip a hair
short of the blurring eye its touch would have made a hopeless smudge.
"Maskey--no can do!" came in Suey's brusque _pidgin_; and then,
following a sudden scuffle and the sharp click of the latch, a familiar
chirrup floated to my ears. "Let me in, Whit-nee! Hur-ree, ple-ese,
Whit-nee!" was what it said.