IN WHICH HUGH RADLETT TELLS HIS OWN STORY, AND THE READER LEARNS
THAT EVEN POLICEMEN HAVE HEARTS
"I cannot explain," the document began, "why I am setting out to put
on paper the story of my life. It is not a life pleasant to recollect.
Probably I am writing it down because I have nothing else to do, and
even the recollection of unhappy things is better than doing nothing.
I have had happy times, of course--very happy times--but my life on
the whole has been unhappy, from the first days I remember clearly to
this day, which finds me rotting away in a Russian prison. The chances
are that I shall die here. Disease takes a heavy toll of us prisoners.
Still, Jack has escaped, and perhaps I shall escape, too, though
they are far more vigilant now since this Government has got better
organised.
"Here I am, forty-three years old, one of the richest men in the world,
yet with hardly a rag to my back, and less power than the meanest of
God's creatures in a civilised country. In this prison with me are more
than a hundred fellow-creatures, rotting with disease, and far less
able to stand privation than I am. I have lived hard: I take a lot of
killing. I do what I can for them. I am prison doctor, prison chaplain,
and a dozen other things all rolled into one. Every one brings me his
troubles. It keeps me with something to do, and that is good. But I am
lonely now Jack is gone.
"I had better begin at the beginning. I was born forty-three years ago
this very day--a queer birthday this. I have been watching over one
of my fellow-prisoners most of it. He died an hour ago. My birthplace
was a two-roomed miner's cottage in England, at Restington, in Durham
County. It was a colliery house, owned by the colliery company, a
miserable shack that ought to have been pulled down long before. It
leaked horribly. The paper was always peeling off the walls, and the
roof always wanted mending. The company used to have it patched up
occasionally, when it got worse than usual; but it always broke out
again in a fresh place. A rotten home. But there were plenty more like
it. The colliery workings ran right under the house, and the subsidence
had caused great cracks in the walls. I remember how those cracks used
to open and shut and open again as the workings proceeded underneath.
"My father, John Radlett, was a collier, but we were very poor. Father
had been too active in Union affairs, and the overseer always saw to it
that he got one of the worst working places in the pit. There was no
minimum wage then. The Unions weren't so strong as I suppose they have
grown since. And father couldn't chuck up his job: no one else in the
district would have employed him. He was a marked man, and he had an
old mother and father to help support as well as us.
"There were five of us--father and mother, my brother and sister, and
myself. My brother Edward was killed in a colliery accident when I was
ten. I remember it well. The cage had fallen to the bottom of the
shaft. My mother took me to the pithead, where there was a crowd of men
and women waiting for news. I was frightened, and ran away and hid in a
shed. My mother found me and told me my brother was dead. After that,
there were only four of us to feed.
"My sister Annie was the eldest--ten years older than I. I was very
fond of her. But four years after Edward was killed she married a
collier from South Wales. His name was Morgan. A few months later he
went back to South Wales to look for work there, and took her with him.
He had quarrelled somehow with father, and we lost touch with Annie
altogether. I have never seen her since. I tried from New York, when I
had made money, to find out where she was, but I could not trace her.
Perhaps she is dead.
"I went to work at thirteen. I had some schooling first, of course, at
a rotten hole of a school pretty nearly as bad as our house. It was
draughty and leaky and horribly cold in the winter. I remember the
schoolmaster--a little fellow with gray hair and a straggly beard, and
tired, watery eyes. He was a very poor hand at keeping order: we did
what we liked with him. He seemed to have lost heart and interest--and
no wonder, after thirty years teaching in that dead-alive village,
miles from anywhere, thirty years of torment from generations of little
devils like me. He taught me little: I gave him no chance. I was glad
to get away from school to the pit.
"I worked two years on the surface, helping the winding engineer, and
learning a good bit about mine machinery. I never went underground
there. I meant to be an engineer when I grew up. Then, when I was
fifteen, mother died. Grandfather and grandmother had died a few months
before, within a week of each other. Father and mother had made all
sorts of plans. We were getting better off, and having enough to eat.
Then mother died, and father and I were left alone in the house. It was
a dreary home after that. And, in a few months' time, came a strike.
"The men lost that strike. They had come out against the wish of the
Union; for, though their case was good, trade was bad. Father was made
chairman of the Strike Committee. When the men went back--starved
out--there was no job for him. The fellows made a collection for him
out of their first week's pay, but he said that he and I would starve
by inches if we stayed. He was turned fifty then, but he made up his
mind to leave England, and go to the States. Mother's death and the
strike had sickened him of the old place.
"We were not quite friendless in America. There was an old friend of
father's who had settled in Colorado years before, and done well. He
had urged father before to come out and join him, but he would not
leave the old people. But now there was nothing to keep him in England.
So he wrote to Jim Merritt saying he would like to come over, and asked
for the loan of the passage money. He got a letter back, enclosing more
than enough, and offering us a warm welcome and the assurance of work
at good pay. Father travelled steerage, and at last we got to Merritt's
place. We found he had risen to be one of the richest men in Colorado.
Father said he would never have dared to write if he had known how
Merritt had risen in the world. He had a whole group of mines under
his control, and a big house in one of the settlements where we stayed
at first. He started father as under-manager to one of his pits, and I
went to work with him as a sort of apprentice to learn the technical
side of the business. Merritt promised to give me a leg up if I shaped
well.
"He was a queer chap, old Merritt. He had never married, and he lived
all alone in a few rooms of his big house, with only one servant. He
was very kind to us; but he was a devil with the men, and expected
father to drive them without mercy. Father and he used to quarrel about
it, and father was always threatening to throw up the job. But he stuck
to it, because of me, I believe.
"The miners were mostly immigrants. There were some Irish and a few
English and Welsh; but most of them were East Europeans, Slavs and
that sort. Their conditions were pretty bad, and accidents were always
happening. The blowing-up of a few now and then seemed to be taken as
a matter of course. Old Merritt wouldn't have any Unions in his pits.
He was always chasing off Union organisers. But by-and-by the Unions
got in, and organised the men secretly. Then they struck. Merritt had
a corps of gunmen, and tried to drive them back to work. Father stuck
up for the men, and he and Merritt had a big quarrel. It came soon to
something like civil war in the pit. The gunmen killed a couple of the
miners' leaders, and the men in revenge rushed one of the shafts and
wrecked it. Father was shot, trying to make peace between them and
the gunmen. The men lost a good friend in him. It was a stranger from
another pit who shot him.
"That was five years after we left England. I was twenty when I was
left all alone. I was mad with old Merritt, and blamed him for father's
death. He was really cut up about it, and offered to pay for a big
funeral; but I wouldn't have it. The men buried father. Then old
Merritt sent for me, and said he wanted me to come and live with him,
and be his heir. I told him to his face to keep his money, and said I
would have nothing to do with him. He tried to argue with me, but I
told him I looked on him as father's murderer.
"While I was at the pit I had picked up a pretty good knowledge of mine
engineering, and I felt I could do something on my own. Father had
saved a bit of money, and I could afford to look round. I went away
to Mexico. After a time I got a job as manager to a big new pit there
that was being developed by a syndicate in New York. By the time I was
twenty-five I was managing a whole group of pits controlled by the
syndicate, and doing very well. It was a rough job; but I had a fairly
free hand, and made conditions better than they might have been. I
thought I was settled there for good.
"Then, one day, I got an unexpected piece of news. Old Merritt had
died in Colorado. I had not heard once from him since the quarrel
after father's death. But he had made me his sole heir. He had no one
belonging to him, and I suppose it was a sort of reparation. He had
left me between four and five million dollars. I was doing well enough
before that, but suddenly I found myself rich.
"Yet, in the long run, my money brought me no happiness. I threw up
my job in Mexico, where I was happy enough, and came to New York. I
was now a biggish mine owner on my own, and I came to terms with the
syndicate I had been working for, and brought old Merritt's mines into
the combine. A couple of years later I became chairman of the board.
"To cut a long story short, after that for a time I couldn't go wrong.
I speculated, and my five million dollars became ten, twenty--I
believe it got to thirty in the end. Everything I touched went right.
And yet I was not ambitious. When I had got all I wanted, I sold out of
the syndicate, put my money into safe investments, and settled down to
a life of leisure.
"That was after my marriage--the fatal mistake of my life. I was
really in love with some one else all the time. Only she was ill--with
consumption--the doctors said she was bound to die. She refused to
marry me: she went away and left me. And then she did not die, after
all: she got well. And when I found out, I was married to the wrong
woman.
"She had gone away to Scotland, where her home was. I got word she was
dead, but it wasn't true. I could not bear the loneliness after she had
gone. And Philippa made me feel she could comfort me and sympathise
with me. I used to talk to her about poor Mary. Philippa made up to
me for my money: I knew that after we were married. She never cared a
button for me. She wasn't one to care.
"Philippa's father had been chairman of the syndicate before me. His
name was Dolmetsch: he had come from Posen when he was a boy. He
speculated, and things went wrong with him. He cut his throat, leaving
Philippa alone. Her mother was dead. Philippa was poor then, and I
suppose I was a very eligible husband. We were married.
"We got on badly from the first: there was really nothing in common
between us. And by-and-by an actor fellow came along. I found out about
him and Philippa. That was after the child was born.
"I spoke to Philippa after I found out. She denied it, but I had made
sure. I told her we could not go on living together. I said I would
settle ten million dollars on her, and give her a divorce. I let her
divorce me--a beastly business. She had the child--poor kid!
"I felt then what a mess I had made of things. And I made up my mind
what to do. As soon as the divorce was done with, I simply disappeared.
I arranged everything with my lawyers--I knew I could trust them.
All my money I put in the hands of trustees. They were to use the
income--unless any of it were needed for the child's education--for
charitable purposes until I turned up to claim it again. If I never did
turn up, it was to be made into a permanent national trust when seven
years had elapsed without their hearing from me. I only told one man,
my lawyer, where I was going, and arranged to let him know from time to
time where I was. Then I quietly dropped out. I was sick of everything.
I wanted to get right away from America and think things out, and
perhaps make a fresh start. I felt black all over: I hadn't the heart
to go to Mary then, though I was free. And I've never had the heart to
go, even now. Perhaps I shall yet, if I ever leave Siberia.
"I went up to Alaska first, and crossed over the Behring Straits into
Asia. I went there simply because it seemed the easiest place to bury
myself in. I wandered right over Asiatic Russia. I had plenty of
adventures and a good share of privations. Some time I'll write them
down, but not now.
"It was lonely. That was what I had meant it to be. But I was pining
for companionship before six months were out. I kept wandering on from
place to place, cursing Philippa--for I was still angry then--and
wondering what on earth to do with the rest of my life.
"Then I met John Pasquett. That was in 1916, I suppose. The war had
been going on a good bit more than a year then, but it hardly affected
us out there. We got no war news--only rumours. I took no particular
notice of them. All I saw was the old Russian government gradually
breaking down under the strain as troops were withdrawn to Europe,
and transport became more difficult. There was a stir, too, among the
political exiles.
"It was a queer meeting of me and Jack Pasquett. I was feeling more
than usually depressed, and I had gone off into a camp in the forest
in the loneliest place I could find. It was about a hundred miles
north-west of Chita. I had built myself a rough hut of logs, and was
living there all alone. Jack just stumbled into my hut one night,
dead beat. He had been travelling through the forest on foot, and had
got lost. He saw my light from a distance, crawled up to my hut, and
fainted.
"I got him round somehow, and the moment I heard him speak I knew what
I had been wanting. He spoke English. I didn't recognise him then,
though I found out later he had been under-manager of one of my own
pits, but I just fell on his neck and cried. Literally, I mean. Then I
nursed him up, and we soon became fast friends.
"French-Canadian by birth, I found he was. But he had left Canada
young, and knocked about the world a lot. He had worked for old Merritt
and then for me in Colorado before coming to Russia. Just before the
war he had been in charge of a big German-owned mining concession on
the Upper Yenisei, near Yeniseisk.
"Except himself, he told me, all the technical men were Germans,
and, when the war came, he was left to carry on the mines alone, with
no settled help. For a time, he kept things going. But it got harder
and harder. His men drifted away. He could not get money to pay them,
though the government kept on making promises. Finally he had to own
himself beaten. His money was all gone, and he saw starvation ahead.
He asked the government to let him go, but they refused, and told him
he must keep the mines at work. In the end, he simply ran away, and
set out to reach America--on foot, mind you--right across Asia. He got
conveyances here and there, but mostly he travelled on his own feet. He
was on that journey when he stumbled into my hut.
"Jack and I settled down together, and stayed the winter out in that
hut. It was during that time he first told me of his discovery. The
gold mines were actively worked on the Upper Yenisei, but he said
that, on one of his expeditions, he had found, lower down the river,
what looked like the richest goldfield in the world--totally unknown
to everybody, in an area inhabited only by a few ignorant peasants.
He was an expert gold miner, and he talked as if he knew. Before long
he was pressing me hard to go in with him, and try to work the thing.
It needed a lot of capital and influence, and he had neither. He said
that with my money we could easily bribe the government into giving us
a favourable concession. I put him off by saying I didn't want to make
any more money. But he had sized me up pretty well--we understood each
other. So he changed his tune, and told me it would be a big exciting
adventure. That caught me. What I wanted was something to do. On the
first sign of spring we went off to have a look at his goldfield.
"It did not take long to convince me that he was right. There was
fabulous wealth to be had for the asking. Apart from rich workable
deposits, we suspected the whole bed of the river--a fair-sized
tributary of the Yenisei--was rich in gold for forty miles at least. I
had got thoroughly excited about it by this time, and my lethargy had
quite worn off. We spent all that spring and summer prospecting and
making elaborate charts and plans. We arranged, too, that, as he had
discovered the place, that should be his contribution. I would put in
the capital needed, and we should share equally in the proceeds. When
the summer ended, we started off together for Petrograd in order to
get in touch with civilisation, and begin working for that concession.
I was to get in touch with my lawyer in New York, and arrange for a
remittance. It was a year since he had heard from me.
"So much for our plans. We made for Yeniseisk, where Jack was known.
That was in the autumn of 1917. From there I wrote off to New York,
but I doubt if the letter ever got there. For at Yeniseisk we had our
first taste of the revolution. The Czar, of course, had been overthrown
in the spring, and Kerensky was nominally in power. But, while we
were at Yeniseisk, came the second revolution. A local Soviet assumed
power, and arrested us both on suspicion of being counter-revolutionary
agents. They flung us into prison, and then, I think, they forgot all
about us. At all events we stayed there two years, and had the doubtful
honour of being imprisoned alternately by both sides--or rather, all
the sides--during the Civil War. Some of them thought we were Czarist
agents; some of them thought we were Bolsheviks. It was no use trying
to explain.
"Finally, we managed to get away, and down to Turkestan. We were trying
to get through to India or Persia, but this made the authorities think
we were British agents, and they locked us up again in this place. I
have had a year now of this. I feel I can't stand much more of it,
since Jack has gone.
"Jack got away a month ago. We meant to escape together, and our plan
seemed good enough. It only meant knocking down one guard and slipping
away quickly in the darkness.
"We knocked him down all right, and started running. But the fellow
made a grab at me as he went down, and refused to let go. He managed to
cry out, too. I could easily have killed him, but I meant him no harm;
and, besides, we should have had no chance of getting away if they had
started after us at once. So I shouted to Jack to run on alone, and I
grabbed the guard by the windpipe and squeezed all the breath out of
him. The other guards came running up and rescued him soon enough, but
it gave Jack just start enough to get clear away.
"They guarded me more securely after that, and I haven't had a chance
of escaping since.
"These Russians are not bad gaolers in their way, despite the filth.
They let me write and do pretty much as I like within the four walls
of the prison. They are only brutal when they are drunk, and now there
is hardly any drink to be had. The worst is the dirt and the vermin,
and the loneliness, and watching my fellow-prisoners die. It seems a
useless sort of a life, mine. And yet I am useful here in a way. If
only----"
At this point came a break in Radlett's story. The document went on in
a different style.
"It is a year and more," the document resumed, "since I wrote down the
story of my life. What a lot has happened during that year! I have
escaped, thanks to Jack's help, and he and I have been six months in
Europe. He came back to save me, good friend that he is. He bribed the
warders, and got a letter in to me at the prison. We got safely away
at last. A hard journey we had of it, making our way down to India,
but at last we reached civilisation again, and I managed to get hold
of my papers that I had left behind in Turkestan. Since then, Jack and
I have thought of nothing but the concession. I have been to Moscow,
and fixed things up with the authorities there, and I have started
negotiations now with the biggest syndicate in England for working the
thing jointly with them. Lord Ealing's influence will be invaluable: he
has a political pull as well as a command of big resources. This affair
of ours is going to be big--bigger even than anything I ever tackled in
America. Russia is a country of marvellous resources, and Jack and I
between us have the brains and the money to make the thing go. Oh, it's
good to be free and back in harness. I've been rusting too long. Some
day perhaps I'll write up these notes into a full story of my life.
Jack says I ought to do it. But I'm too busy now. There's all this work
about the concession to be done. And, if I were to die--though I don't
feel a bit like dying--Jack would carry the thing on. All my money goes
to him, of course. He's the one real friend I've had in my life. I'm a
different man since I got to know him, and different again since I got
back into harness. I'm enjoying myself like a boy, and so is Jack."
There Hugh Radlett's story ended. Blaikie put it down. "He had a bad
time, poor chap," he said to himself. "But he seems to have cheered up
wonderfully. Writes like a different man in that last bit. I wonder
what that fellow Pasquett's like. I suppose he'll be turning up soon.
Sounds an interesting chap. And Radlett was mighty fond of him. Like
David and Jonathan," thought the Inspector. "Quite touching." Blaikie
was a bit of a sentimentalist himself.