The Complete Simon Iff (35 page)

She was snowed under with jewelry; also she had a pair of piebald ponies, and a hydroplane, and a twelve-inch reflector telescope in case she wanted to study astronomy. Publicity has its points, even in Beacon Street.

People thought it all rather remarkable; but if Mrs. Cass and Mr. Travis had nothing to say, why, nobody else had. One couldn't attach any importance to newspaper reports, could one, or where would one be?

So everything went off splendidly. Travis took the usual month from his business, and it was decided to cruise down the coast in his steam yacht, the Opossum, a magnificant trubine boat of two thousand tons.

Simon Iff, having done his duty as best man, returned to New York. Miss Mollie Madison was in the chair car, and, the train being due in New York at seven o'clock, he asked her to come and have dinner with him. "Do take me to Chinatown!" she begged. "It will be so wonderful, as you can speak and read Chinese so marvellously. You spent years there, didn't you?"

"Young woman," replied Iff, sternly, "consider yourself suspected. You wish to find yourself in a labyrinth of secret passages, with gambling halls, opium joints, and Even Worse Things in full blast. You want tong wars and unspeakable tortures. You have been reading cheap fiction."

She tried to make her face match her hair, and nearly succeeded.

"It's all rubbish," pursued the mystic inexorably. "The Chinese is an exceptionally simple, quiet, honest, kind-hearted individual. You should try to imitate him, even if from afar."

"To me he seems absolutely mysterious."

"When I last left China - for my sins - I travelled on the same steamer as Sir Robert Hart, who had just completed his fifty years in the country. He told me that he had got to the stage where he could tell pretty well what a Chinese would do in any given set of circumstances, but that he hadn't the faintest notion of why he would do it."

"But there is a common basis of motive throughout human nature."

"I don't believe it. I think the Chinese has a peripheral consciousness, instead of an egocentric one, as the Aryan has. Hence his attitude towards death, for example. To him the universe is a continual flux, individuals being but transitory accretions. Why should he expect permanence in the impermanent? It is idiotic, to his mind, to quarrel with the Law of the Universe. For he is the supreme realist. He never shirks facts. That is why he has to use opium if he wants to dream. Europeans can fool themselves much more easily."

"I thought it was just the opposite."

"Man made God in his own image; but it has been reserved for Anglo-Saxon conceit to make everybody in its own image. Could you oblige me with the loan of an illegitimate child?"

Mollie jumped out of her chair, really aflame this time. "Mr. Iff! Do you know what you are saying?"

"Sit down, my dear!" laughed the mystic. "You're Aryan, all right. A Chinese would have been simple about it, said 'no', and gone on with his business. You, instead of answering a plain question, minding your own affairs, and leaving me to mind mine, made a fuss, incidentally exhibiting another quite Aryan quality, a Guilty Conscience."

"I have not!"

"Oh yes, you have! You don't worry about matters unless you are potentially or actually capable of them. Tell me that my house in Pittsburg is burnt down, and I do not fret, because I have not a house in Pittsburg, and please God, I never will have!"*

"I seem to have given myself away!"

"You have. Now try something unheard of on Tze-wei, who shall be our host to-night. Try to surprise or to upset him. You get a jade bracelet if you succeed."

Miss Mollie Madison revolved the matter in her head awhile; and at the conclusion of the Chow Mein dinner of no particular importance, asked the proprietor for the head of his father. She had some vague idea that ancestor-worship would make this a peculiarly horrible request. Tze-wei however replied quite calmly that it was impossible, he having been beheaded by the German troops when they entered Peking, and the head having been used for pistol practice thereafter. Miss Mollie Madison was smitten with great agony of remorse; but Simple Simon reassured her, and drew her attention by showing her how Chinese writing was done. He covered the whole menu with the queer characters before he tired. Then he paid the bill, and took her to her apartment. "We shall meet," was his gay farewell, "at Philippi." And she lay awake half the night wondering what he could possibly mean by that.

II

A heavy sea-fog hung over a windless Boston one Friday night, nigh a month later. Mrs. Cass was reading a wireless message from Dolores. The Opossum was hung up under the banks in the fog, but the Captain hoped to be able to make Boston in another forty-eight hours.

As a matter of fact, the Opossum - at that moment - was not at all a good place for a nervous person. The fog hung like a wet sheet upon the sea; everything in the boat was clammily warm, like a freshly-killed corpse. The air was horrible to breathe; its stagnation was oppressive beyond all words. The blare of the half-minute horn was torture to any sensitive ear; and the solo became a concert whenever other ships came within earshot. It was an inferno of discomfort, boredom, and that apprehension which impotence or constraint always begets in a man, whose one true passion is his supposed Free Will. It was impossible to forge ahead, even dead slow; the Captain was caught between shoal waters and the North Atlantic Sea lanes. He was safest where he was.

Geoffrey Travis and his wife, who had decided to call each other Mutt and Jeff, were fearfully bored, and horribly ashamed to confess it. It seemed to them the Doom of Love, the Dawn of Divorce; so they said nothing, and made brave pretence to be amused. Dolores had a brain that simply would not work on such lines; her forced cheerfulness gave her a genuine number one headache, and she went off to bed, though it was just after tiffin. Night was the same as day in a fog such as this! Travis himself tried to sleep, failed, started piquet with the mate, tired in an hour, finally drifted on to the bridge, where the Captain was doing his trick.

"There's a crazy skipper loose," growled he as Travis approached. "Remember that queer boat that picked us up just out of Halifax?"

"That four-funnelled sea-serpent? Some new destroyer on her trials, we thought."

Yes, that's the chap. Flying Dutchman, I guess. Come past us just now, within three cables, doing his forty knots! It's not believable. For the land's sake! There he goes again!"

Travis peered through the fog. A slight breeze had sprung up, and lifted it in patches here and there. In one comparatively thin streak, where waifs of vapour drifted slowly upon the dead waters, he could perceive the hull of the devilish warship, if it were one; it looked like a shark or a seal on a gigantic scale. She bored her nose constantly into the seas, which broke clean over her, so great was her speed. It was a brief glimpse; a few seconds took her again into the unchallengeable greyness of the sea without bound.

Both Travis and the Captain were most peculiarly impressed, and not very pleasantly. An apparently new type of craft, of astonishing power, behaving like a dangerous lunatic! The Captain smelt something sinister.

An hour later, the breeze began to freshen seriously. The Opossum's engines began to revolve. But hardly had she gathered way when the look-out cried from the forecastle.

"Raft ahoy! Raft on the st'b'd bow, sir!"

Twilight, and swirling fog; yet Travis, leaning on the rail, could see the vague outline. There was a man, plainly enough visible. He ran to the bridge; but the Captain had already rung off his engines, and ordered out a boat. He then bethought him: "By Jove, an adventure after Mutt's own heart!" And he ran down to her cabin.

The headache left her in an instant; she snatched her sou'wester, and was first into the boat. A few minutes carried her to the side of the raft. They grappled it with boat-hooks, and she sprang aboard.

It was a small rough raft, some eight feet by ten. A short thick mast stood up, and to it was nailed the Union Jack reversed as a signal of distress. Below this, something else was nailed. A marlin-spike was thrust through the hands of a dead man; another through his feet. He had been horribly mutilated; his ears and lips cut off, his nose split, his eyes gouged, his scalp removed.

A sailor's clasp-knife was forced between his ribs; it pinned a paper to his side, and this paper was the cover of a Chinese missionary magazine. The man himself had, Dolores felt sure, been of the yellow race; the skull, the nose, the cheek bones, were conclusive. He wore a torn flannelette shirt, a cheap suit of coat and trousers. In the pockets were stuffed twelve silver salt cellars of no great value; some still half full of the condiment. His chest was bare; on it was tattooed a design of a blue snake twined about an anchor. The body showed signs of extreme emaciation.

"This," pronounced Dolores with ineffable unction, "is no ordinary crime."

Detective fever set in with extreme virulence. She insisted on tackle being rigged to hoist the raft, intact, upon the deck of the yacht. Every cable of the way to Boston Harbour she sat and studied it.

On arrival, the police immediately took charge of the exhibit, and proceeded with the usual formalities. The Press adopted a peculiar attitude. Some papers reported the incident briefly and without comment; others, less sophisticated or more intent on circulation than on reputation, gave the story straight-forwardly and at length; but the 'Turkey-Buzzard', the paper that had backed the Second Girl, was excessively peeved, and, under the headline

'Tout lasse, tout passe, tout Cass--e'

accused Dolores point-blank of having created a new stunt of some kind, and warned her that this article was the last piece of publicity she would get in those columns, unless through legitimate channels, such as the divorce court.

Dolores was furious; she set her teeth to show the world that this was no fake.

It was clear to her from the start that the murdered man was the victim of revenge, probably the result of treachery. The executioners had mutilated him partly for the sake of the punishment, partly to prevent identification. The snake and anchor were left, because few would recognize him by these marks, except, possibly, some people whom it was wished to warn. The silver salt-cellars were possibly the price of his treason, actually or symbolically. The missionary magazine cover perhaps indicated that he was a 'native Christian,' the Union Jack that he was from Canada, or originally from a British possession. For Dolores could not get it out of her head that the raft had been deliberately set adrift. It was entirely bare; no food or water, or any receptacle; no trace of the presence of any other person. The object of the whole performance was paramountly clear: "Don't let it happen to you!" was the English for it.

The police had failed to identify the man; there had been no missing Chinaman within a month, as it happened, except a few whose bodies had already been claimed. Dolores, on the Christianity clue, had made enquiries at the various missions; but her only fresh fact was that the snake-and-anchor was a common device among sailors from Canton.

She formulated her quest under two heads: Who is the man, and who killed him? The spectacular nature of his punishment led her to think that her best plan might be to find out who needed the warning.

And then she began to revolve about the point: Why a raft? Why take this risky method of advertisement? The coast is patrolled. Unless the man had been killed at sea, which could hardly happen unless in a Chinese-owned and Chinese-manned ship, it would have been much more sensible to leave the body in the streets. There must be some very cogent reason for the raft.

This business began to eat into her life. Social duties went by the board. 'Jeff' was happy enough that 'Mutt' should be so intensely occupied; he did not even mind her talking in her sleep. He fell naturally into lunching downtown at Louis', or the club; usually Mutt would drop in, and distractedly toy with a chop. She was really in despair; if only she could have appealed to Simon Iff! But her pride prevented her.

She tried to trace the salt-cellars; but they were of a common pattern, sold by the thousand. There might be more in the idea that the number twelve had some significance. Possibly, again, the Chinese had some peculiar superstition about salt.

III

She now spent most of her time in the Chinese quarter. Her charm earned her plenty of friends, but of course nobody knew anything about the raft incident. There was, however, one old man who gave her some excellent advice. "A child!" he said, "see its body, which is like the bough of a rotten tree, and its mind is like slaked lime. Be at peace; this is Heaven's appointment, and the way of perfection."

Dolores, every nerve high-strung, reacted instantly against the philosopher. His words were kindly and sensible, but she was certain that a threat was intended: "Keep your nose out of what doesn't concern you!" Somehow or other she must be on the right track.

She took to watching the old fellow closely. She learnt that he had kept a drug-store of the Chinese variety for thirty years; he was of good character, so far as the police knew.

A Japanese went to his shop, at nearly the same time, nearly every night; the man was a tattooer, and bought inks. But why should he not lay in a stock of inks to last a month or a year? The purchase was an excuse; they really conferred about other things.

The next day she called on the Japanese. She was certain that he had lied to the police in saying that he had never executed the snake-and-anchor design. She ordered him to do a dragon on her shoulder, and gained leasure to observe. There was only one object visible which was at variance with the obvious characteristics of the tattooer. This was a letter-file. She determined to get a chance to examine it. So, on her second visit, she pretended to faint with the pain of the needle, and sent him out for brandy. She opened the file; almost at once she came on a miniature of the snake-and-anchor design, with a page of writing beneath it; a list, perhaps. She secreted it. The brandy failed to restore her courage; she left, promising to come back in the afternoon. She had the paper photographed, and restored the original on her next visit. She had the list translated, and looked up the owners of the names.