alone his statement may be worthless, but taken in connection with the
fact that you are in the habit of visiting his opium den by the river,
it would be difficult to persuade any judge that he was lying. I myself
have seen you going in there and coming out."
He watched Joicey stare at him with blind rage; he watched him stagger
and reach out groping hands for a chair, and he saw the huge defiance
evaporate, leaving Joicey a trembling mass of nerves.
"It's a lie," he said, mumbling the words as though they were dry bread.
"It's a damned, infernal lie!"
A long silence followed upon his words, and Joicey mopped his face with
his handkerchief, breathing hard through his nose, his hands shaking as
though he was caught by an ague fit.
"I'm in a corner," he said at last; "you've got the whip-hand of me,
Coryndon, but when I said I was not in Mangadone that night, I was
speaking the truth."
"You were splitting a hair," suggested Coryndon.
Joicey drew his heavy eyebrows together in an angry frown.
"Let that question rest," he said, conquering his desire to break loose
in a passion of rage.
"You went down Paradise Street some time after sunset. Will you tell me
exactly whom you saw on your way to the river house?"
Craven Joicey steadied his voice and thought carefully.
"I passed Heath, the Parson, he was coming from the direction of the
lower wharves, and was going towards Rydal's bungalow. I remember that,
because Rydal was in, my mind at the time; I had heard that his wife was
ill, probably dying, and just after I saw Absalom."
He paused for a moment and moistened his lips.
"Was he with anyone when you saw him?"
"No, he was alone, and he was carrying a parcel. Anyhow, that is all I
can tell you about him that night."
Joicey looked up as though he considered that he had said enough.
"And from there you went to the opium den," said Coryndon relentlessly.
The perspiration dripped from Joicey's hair, and he took up the threads
of the story once more.
"I went there," he said, biting the words savagely. "I was sick at the
time. I'd had a go of malaria and was as weak as a kitten. The place was
empty, and only Leh Shin was in the house, and whether he gave me a
stronger dose, or whether I was too seedy to stand my usual quantity, I
can't tell you, but I overslept my time."
He passed his hand over his face with a sideways look that was horrible
in its shamefacedness. Coryndon avoided looking at him in return, and
waited patiently until he went on.
"Leh Shin remained with me. He never leaves the house whilst I am
inside," continued Joicey. "I was there the night of the twenty-ninth
and the day of the thirtieth. Luckily it was a Sunday and there was no
fear of questions cropping up, and I only got out at nightfall when it
was dark enough for me to go back without risk. Since then," he said,
rising to his feet and striking the writing-table with a clenched fist,
"I have been driven close to madness. Hartley was put on to the track of
Leh Shin by the lying old Burman, Mhtoon Pah, and Leh Shin's shop was
watched and he himself threatened. God! What I've gone through."
"Thank you," said Coryndon, pushing back his chair. "You have been of
the very greatest assistance to me."
Joicey sat down again, a mere torment-racked mass, deprived of the help
of his pretence, defenceless and helpless because his sin had found him
out in the person of a slim, dark-faced man, who looked at him with
burning pity in his eyes.
The world jests at the abstract presentment of vice. From pulpits it
appears clothed in attractive words and is spoken of as alluring; and,
supported by the laughter of the idle and the stern belief of the
righteous in its charms, man sees something gallant and forbidden in
following its secret paths. The abstract view has the charm and
attraction of an impressionist picture, but once the curtain is down,
and the witness stands out with a terrible pointing finger, the laughter
of the world dies into silence, and the testimony of the preacher that
vice is provided with unearthly beauty becomes a false statement, and
man is conscious only of the degradation of his own soul.
Coryndon left the room noiselessly and returned up the steps, along the
corridor and down the stone flight that led into the subsiding heat of
the late afternoon. The young man with the smooth, affable manner
wheeled a bicycle out of a far corner, and smiled pleasantly at
Coryndon.
"You saw the Manager, and got what you wanted?"
"I saw him, and got even more than I wanted," said Coryndon, with
conviction.
Things like this puzzled the dream side of his nature and left him
exhausted. The gathering passion of rage in Joicey's eyes had not
touched him, but the memory of the big, bull-dog, defiant man huddled on
the low chair, his arm over his face, was a memory that spoke of other
things than what he had come there to discover; the terrible things that
are behind life and that have power over it. He had to collect himself
with definite force, as a child's attention is recalled to a
lesson-book.
"He has cleared Leh Shin," he said to himself, and at first exactly all
that the words meant was not clear to his mind. Joicey had cleared the
Chinaman of complicity, and had knocked the whole structure of carefully
selected evidence away with a few words.
Coryndon was back in Hartley's bungalow with this to consider; and it
left him in a strange place, miles from any conclusion. He had sighted
the end of his labours, seen the reward of his long secret watchfulness,
and now they had withdrawn again beyond his grasp. Heath had seen
Absalom with the Chinaman's assistant. Joicey, whose evidence marked a
later hour than that of Heath, had seen him alone, and the solitary
figure of the small boy hurrying into the dark was the last record that
indicated the way he had gone.
Nothing connected itself with the picture as Coryndon sat brooding over
it, and then gradually his mind cleared and the confusion of the
destruction of his carefully worked-out plan departed from his brain
like a wind-blown cloud. There was a link, and his sensitive fine
fingers caught it suddenly, the very shock of contact sending the blood
into his cheeks.
The picture was clear now. Absalom, a little white-clad figure, slim,
eager and dutiful, hurried into the shadows of night, but Coryndon was
at his heels this time. The clue was so tiny, so infinitesimal, that it
took the eye of a man trained to the last inch in the habit of seeing
everything to notice it, but it did not escape Coryndon.
He joined Hartley at tea in the sitting-room, with its semi-official air
of being used for serious work, and Hartley fulfilled his avocation by
bringing Coryndon back from strange places into the heart of sane
humdrum existence. Surely if some men are pillars, and others rockets,
and more poets, professors and preachers, some are hand-rails, and only
the man who has just been standing on a dizzy height looking sheer into
the bottomless pit where nothing is safe and where life crumbles and
fear is too close to the consciousness, knows the value and even the
beauty of a hand-rail, and knows that there is no need to mock at its
limitations. For a few minutes Coryndon leant upon the moral support of
Hartley's cheery personality, and then he told him that he was going
back to the Bazaar that night, as circumstances led him to believe that
he might find what he wanted there and there only.
"That means that you have cleared Heath?"
Hartley's voice was relieved.
"Heath is entirely exonerated."
Coryndon wandered to the piano, and he played the twilight into the
garden, the bats out of the eaves, and he played the shadow of Joicey's
shame off his own soul until he was refreshed and renewed, and it was
time for him to return to his disguise and slip out of the house.
XXI
DEMONSTRATES THE PERSUASIVE POWER OF A KNIFE EDGE, AND TELLS A STORY OF
A GOLD LACQUER BOWL
The obese boy sat in Leh Shin's shop, fiddling sometimes with his ears
and sometimes with the soles of his bare feet. He found life just a
little dull, and had he been able to express himself as "bored," he
would doubtless have done so. Peeling small dry scales of skin off
wear-hardened heels is not the most exciting occupation life affords,
and the assistant wished more than once that his master would return
from either the gambling den or the Joss House and liberate him for the
night.
It was his night at the river house, and small opportunities for
pilfering from the drugged sleepers made these occasions both amusing
and profitable. On the whole he enjoyed the nights in the den, and they
added considerably to his bank in a box secreted behind the Joss who
flamed and pranced on the wall. Meanwhile, nothing was doing in the
shop, and company there was none, unless the cockroaches and the lizards
could be reckoned in that category.
His master had been shaky and short of temper when he awoke from his
afternoon sleep, and had struck his assistant over the head more than
once in the course of an argument. Unseen things ticked and rustled in
dark corners, and the boy yawned loudly and stretched his arms, making
himself more hideous as his contracted mouth opened to its full oval in
his large round face. Still nothing happened and no one came, and he
returned to the closer examination of a blister that interested him. He
probed it with a needle, and it indicated its connection with his foot
by stinging as though he had burnt himself with a match.
He was seated on a table bending over his horrible employment, half
pastime, half primitive operation, the light of the lamp full upon him,
when a sound of padding feet shook the floor and he looked up, his eyes
full of the effort of listening attentively, and saw a face peering in
at the door. For a moment he was startled, and then he swung his legs,
which hung short of the floor, over the side of the table and laughed
out loud.
"So thou art back, Mountain of Wisdom?" he said jeeringly. "Come within
and tell me of thy journey."
The Burman crept in stealthily, looking around him.
"Aye, I am back. Having done the business."
Curiosity leapt into the eyes of the Chinaman, and he dropped his
attitude of contempt.
"What business?" he asked greedily. "Before thy departure thou wast
mute, stricken as a dumb man, neither wouldst thou speak in response to
any question."
The Burman curled himself up on the floor and smiled complaisantly.
"None the less, the business is done, O Bowl of Ghee, and I have
returned."
The assistant ignored the personal description, and adopted a manner
calculated to ingratiate himself into the friendly confidence of the mad
Burman. He wriggled off the table and crouched on the floor a few inches
off Coryndon's face, and the contact being too close for human
endurance, Coryndon threw himself back into the corner and retired
behind a mask of cunning obstinacy.
"Thy business, thy business," repeated the boy. "Was it in the nature of
the evil works of the bad man, thy friend?" He leered his encouragement,
and fumbling at his belt took out a small coin. "Here, I will give thee
two annas if thou tell the whole story to my liking."
The Burman shook his head, but he appeared to be considering the offer
slowly in his obtuse and stagnant brain.
"Give the money into mine own hand, that the reward be sure," he said,
as though he toyed with the idea.
"Not so," replied the boy. "First the boiled rice and the salt, and
afterwards the payment. Thus is the way in honest dealings."
The Burman shut his mouth tightly and exhibited signs of a return to his
former condition of dumbness that worked upon the assistant like gall.
"Then, if nothing less will content thee, take thy money," he said in
frothy anger. "Take it and speak low, for it may be that eavesdroppers
are without in the street."
He dropped the coin into the outstretched palm, but the Burman did not
begin his story. He got up and searched behind boxes and shook the rows
of hanging garments. He was so secret and silent that the boy became
exasperated and closed the narrow door into the street with a bang,
pulling across a heavy chain.
"Let that content thee," he said irritably, chafing under the delay, and
sitting down, a frowsy, horrible object, in the dim corner, he prepared
to enjoy a further description out of the wild fantastic terrors of the
madman's brain.
Surprise does not hover; its coming events are shadowless, and its
spring is the spring of a tiger out of the dark, and surprise came upon
Leh Shin's assistant as it has come upon men and nations since the world
first spun in space.
He looked upon the Burman as a harmless lunatic, and he only
half-believed that he had ever been guilty of the act that had ended in
a term of imprisonment in the Andaman Islands, but in one moment he
realized that it might all be true and that he himself was possibly
singled out as the next victim.
In one silent moment he found himself pinned in his corner, the Burman
squatting in front of him, a long knife which he had never seen before
pointing at his throat with horrible, determined persistency.
He opened his mouth and thought to cry out for help, but the Burman
leaned forward and warned him that if he did so, his last minute had
inevitably come.
"I am thy friend, thy good and honourable friend," he said pleasantly as
he made play with the Afghan dagger. "I do but make mirth for both
myself and thee, and I have no thought to harm thee."
The flesh of the gross body crept and crawled under the Burman's look.
Fate had put the heart of a chicken in the huge frame of Leh Shin's
assistant, and it beat now like pelting hail on a frozen road. He was
close to a raw, naked fear, and it made him shameless as he gibbered and
cowered before it.
"I have no money," he said, bleating out the words. "All that I have is
already paid to thee for thy tale."
He whined and cringed and writhed in his close corner.
"I have heard a strange tale," Coryndon said, bending a little closer to
him. "Old now as stale fish that has lain in the dust of the street. It
has been whispered in my ear that thou knowest how Absalom came to his
end."
"I slew him in the house of a seaman," said the boy, in a quavering
voice. "Now take the point of thy knife from my throat, for it doth
greatly inconvenience pleasant speech between thee and me."
Coryndon's watchful eye detected the lie before it announced itself in
words, or so it seemed to the boy, who resigned himself to the mere
paltry limitations of fact, and confessed that he and Absalom had been
friends and that he had never killed anything except a chicken, and once
a dog that was too young to bite his hand.
The details of the story came out at long intervals, with breaks of
sweating terror between each one. Pieced together, it was simple enough.
In spite of the existing feud between their masters, Leh Shin's
assistant and Absalom had struck up a kind of friendship that was not
unlike the friendship of any two boys in any quarter of the globe. They
used special knocks upon the door, and when they passed as strangers in
the streets they made masonic signs to one another, and they also
gambled with European cards in off hours.
The desire for money, so strong in the Chinaman, grew gradually in the
mind of the Christian boy, whose descent to Avernus was marked first by
the sale of his Sunday school prize-books, which he disposed of at the
Baptist Mission shop, receiving several rupees in return. Having once
possessed himself of what was wealth to him, and having lost most of it
in the gentlemanly vice of gambling, he began to need more, but being
slow-witted he could think of no way better than robbing Mhtoon Pah,
which suggestion the Chinaman's assistant looked upon as both dangerous
and weak, regarded in the light of a workable plan.
It was inside his bullet-head that the idea of a plot that could not be
discovered came into its first nebulous being. Absalom found out that
Mhtoon Pah was looking for a gold lacquer bowl, and through the agency
of Leh Shin the bowl was eventually marked down as the property of a
seaman who was lodging temporarily near the opium den by the river, one
of Leh Shin's clients. The assistant had the good fortune to overhear
the preliminaries of the sale, and he immediately saw his opportunity,
as genius alone sees and recognizes chances. It was he who first told
Absalom that the bowl was located, and it was he who realized that
chance was beckoning on the adventurer.
It was arranged that Absalom should inform Mhtoon Pah that the coveted
treasure was to be had for a price, and it was also the part of Mr.
Heath's best scholar, to obtain the money from Mhtoon Pah that was to be
paid over to the seaman for the bowl. By this time Absalom's gambling
debts had become a serious question with him, and even a lifelong
mortgage upon his weekly pay could hardly cover his liabilities. Besides
which, he had to live. That painful necessity which dogs the career of
greater men than Absalom.
He appeared to have an almost childish trust in the craft and guile of
his Chinese friend, and set the whole matter before him. Mhtoon Pah was
ready to pay two hundred rupees for the lacquer bowl, as he was already
offered five hundred by Mrs. Wilder, and was content with the profit.
Two hundred rupees was a sum that was essentially worth some risk. To
hand it over to a drunken seaman was against all moral precept. The
sailor's ways were scandalous, his gain would go into evil hands.
Treated in this manner, even a Sunday-school graduate could lull an
uneasy conscience, and as far as Coryndon could judge, Absalom was not
troubled by any warnings from that silent mentor. Out of the brain of
Leh Shin's assistant the great scheme had leapt full-grown, and it only
required a little careful preparation to put it into action.
The assistant knew the sailor, a Lascar with a craving for drink, and he
became friendly with him "out of hours," and learned his ways and the
times when he was likely to be in the house where he lodged. The sailor,
having come to know that value was attached to his bowl, guarded it with
avaricious care when in a condition to do so; and Leh Shin, who trusted
his assistant, through whom the news of the deal had first come to his
ear, offered the man fifty rupees for what he had merely stolen from a
shop in Pekin. It took the assistant a full week to arrange events so
that he and Absalom could work together for the moral good of the
sailor, and protect him from the snares of lucre, represented by a third
of the money Leh Shin expected to receive.
He dwelt with some pride upon the fact, and his vanity in this
particular almost conquered his fear of the Afghan blade that still
nestled close to his bull neck. He had drunk in friendship with the
sailor, dropping a drug into his cup, and waiting till his eyes grew dim
and he fell forward in a heavy sleep. But even in the moment of
achievement his wits were worth more than the wits of Absalom, for he
ran out of the house and established an alibi while the Christian boy
filched the bowl from beneath the bed of the intoxicated sailor. At a
given hour he waited for Absalom just where Heath had stood after he
had parted from Rydal, and so chance played twice into his hands in one
night. Absalom, who appeared to have imbibed some rudimentary principles
of honour among thieves, passed the boy his share, which was a hundred
and twenty rupees, including his debts of honour, and having done so,
sped away into the night, the bowl under his arm.
"And that is all the story," said the boy, beating his hands on the
floor, and returning from the momentary forgetfulness of the narrative
to the immediate fear of the knife. "Further than that, I know nothing.
The hour is late and if I am not at the river house I shall feel the
wrath of my master."
"It is a poor tale, a paltry tale," said the Burman, in tones of
disgust. "One that hardly requites me for my patience in hearing it
out."
He slipped his knife back into his belt and got up from his heels with a
leisurely movement. The boy, still on all fours, watched him closely,
and the Burman, his eye attracted by a bright tin kettle hanging among
the other goods dependent from the ceiling, stood looking at it, and as
he looked the boy dodged out with a rush, overturning a bale of goods,
and tearing at the door like a mad dog, disappeared into the street.
Coryndon watched him go, and went back to his corner to wait until Leh
Shin should return from either the gambling den or the Joss House. He
had something to say to Leh Shin, something that could not wait to be
said, and he composed himself to the necessary patience that is part of
all close, careful search, and while he waited, he turned over the
evidence that had arisen from the little clue that Joicey had given him.
Absalom had a parcel under his arm, and that parcel was the gold lacquer
bowl that had passed from Mhtoon Pah's curio shop to Mrs. Wilder's
writing-table.
Coryndon fiddled with his fingers in the dust of the floor, and took a
blood-stained rag out of his pocket and spread it over his knee. Here
was another tangible piece of evidence brought by Mhtoon Pah to Hartley.
So the record of circumstance closed in. Coryndon thought again. A
lacquer bowl and a stained rag of silk, that was all. If he handed over
the case to Hartley and Mhtoon Pah was really guilty, other evidence
would in all probability be found, and the whole mystery made clear.
He leaned against the wall and watched the throbbing lamp-wick, fighting
his passion for completed work and his conviction that only he could see
it through to its ultimate conclusion. He knew that he was dealing with
wits quite as crafty as his own, and argued the point from the other
side. Mhtoon Pah had given the rag himself to Hartley, and had sworn
that the bowl was left on the steps of his shop. If no further proof was
forthcoming, these two facts unsupported were almost worthless. Unless a
complete denial of his story could be set against it, Hartley stood to
be checkmated.
Coryndon had nearly decided against Leh Shin. He drew his knees up under
his chin and came to a definite conclusion. He could not give up the
case as it stood; he was absolved from any hint of professional
jealousy, and he could count himself free to follow the evidence until
it led him irrevocably to the spot where the whole detail was clear and
definite.
All the faces of the men who had figured in the drama floated across his
mind, and he thought of the strange key that turned in the lock of one
small trivial destiny, opening other doors as if by magic. Absalom's
life or death had no outward connection with the Head of the Mangadone
Banking Firm, it had nothing in all its days to bring it into touch with
Rydal and Rydal's tragedy--Rydal whom Coryndon had never seen. It lay
apart, severed by race and every possible accident of birth or chance,
from the successful wife of a successful Civil Servant, or an earnest,
hard-working clergyman, and yet the great net of Destiny had been spread
on that night of the 29th of July, and every one of them had fallen into
its meshes.
All the immense problem of the plan that so decides the current of men's
lives came over him, and he saw the limitless value of the insignificant
in life. Absalom was only a little floating piece of jetsam on the great
waters that divided all these lives, yet he was the factor that had
taken the place of the keystone in the arch; the pivot around which the
force that guided and ruled the whole apparent chaos had moved. Coryndon
wandered a long way in his thoughts from the shop where he sat on the
dusty floor, waiting for the return of Leh Shin. He was so still that
the cockroaches and black-beetles crept out again and formed into
marauding expeditions where the shadows of the hanging clothes fell
dark.
He turned himself from the pressure of his thought and closed his eyes,
resting his brain in a quiet pool of untroubled silence. He knew the
need and the art of absolute relaxation from the strain of thought, and
though he did not sleep, he looked as though he slept, until he heard
the sound of approaching feet and a hand pushed against the door.
XXII
IN WHICH CORYNDON HOLDS THE LAST THREAD AND DRAWS IT TIGHT
When Leh Shin opened the shop door and pushed in his grey, gaunt face,
he looked around as though wondering in a half-dreamy, half-detached
abstraction where some object he had expected to see had gone. At length
his eyes wandered to the Burman, who sat on the ground eyeing him with a
curiously intent and concentrated regard.