The Sleuth of St. James Street
by
Melville Davisson Post
Part 6 out of 6
will see that it is cast, not graven."
He beckoned me to come closer, and I rose and stood beside him.
He went on as with a lecture:
"The reason given by the natives why this image is not found in
Southern Asia is that it cannot be cast anywhere but in the
Tibetan monasteries. A certain ritual at the time of casting is
necessary to produce a perfect figure. This ritual is a secret
of the Khan monasteries. Castings of this form of image made
without the ritual are always defective; so I was told in India."
He moved the glass box a little closer to the edge of the
mantelpiece.
"Naturally," he went on, "I considered this story, to be a mere
piece of religious pretension. It amused me to make some
experiments, and to my surprise the castings were always
defective. I brought the image to England."
He shrugged his shoulders as with a careless gesture.
"In my idle time here I tried it again. And incredibly the
result was always the same; some portion of the figure showed a
flaw. My interest in the thing was permanently aroused. I
continued to experiment."
He laughed in a queer high cackle.
"And presently I found myself desperately astride a hobby. I got
all the Babbitt metal that I could buy up in England and put in
the days and not a few of the nights in trying to cast a perfect
figure of this confounded Buddha. But I have never been able to
do it."
He opened a drawer of the gun-case and brought over to the fire
half a dozen castings of the Buddha in various sizes.
Not one among the number was perfect. Some portion of the figure
was in every case wanting. A hand would be missing, a portion of
a shoulder, a bit of the squat body or there would be a flaw
where the running metal had not filled the mold.
"I'm hanged," he cried, "if the beggars are not right about it.
The thing can't be done! I've tried it in all sorts of
dimensions. You will see some of the big figures in the garden.
I've used a ton of metal and every sort of mold."
Then he flung his hand out toward the bookcase.
"I've studied the art of molding in soft metal. I have all the
books on it, and I've turned the boathouse into a sort of shop.
I've spent a hundred pounds - and I can't do it!"
He paused, his big face relaxed.
"The country thinks I'm mad, working with such outlandish
deviltry. But, curse the thing, I have set out to do it and I am
not going to throw it up."
And suddenly with an unexpected heat he damned the Buddha,
shaking his clenched hand before the box.
"Your pardon, Robin," he cried, the moment after. "But the
thing's ridiculous, you know. The ritual story would be sheer
rubbish. The beggars could not affect a metal casting with a
form of words."
I have tried to set down here precisely what my uncle said. It
was the last talk I ever had with the man in this world, and it
profoundly impressed me. He was in fear, and his jovial manner
was a ghastly pretence. I left him sitting by the fire drinking
neat whisky from a tumbler.
The old man-servant took me up to my room. It was a big room in
a wing of the house looking out on the garden and the sea. I saw
that it had been cleaned and made ready against my coming;
clearly the old man expected me.
He put the candle on the table and laid back the covers of the
bed. And suddenly I determined to have the matter out with him.
"Andrew," I said, "why did you add that significant word to my
uncle's letter?"
He turned sharply with a little whimpering cry.
"The master, sir!" he said, and then he stopped as though
uncertain in what manner to go on. He made a hopeless sort of
gesture with his extended hands.
"I thought your coming might interrupt the thing . . . . You are
of his family and would be silent."
"What threatens my uncle?" I cried, "What is the thing?"
He hesitated, his eyes moving about the floor.
"Oh, sir," he said, "the master is in some wicked ,and dangerous
business. You heard his talk, sir; that would not be the talk of
a man at peace . . . . He has strange visitors, sir, and the
place is watched. I cannot tell you any more than that, except
that something is going to happen and I am shaken with the fear
of it."
I looked out through the musty curtains before I went to bed.
But the whole world was dark, packed down in the thick mist.
Once, in the direction of the open sea, I thought I saw the
flicker of a light.
I was tired and I slept profoundly, but somewhere in the sleep I
saw my uncle and a priest of Tibet gibbering over a ladle of
molten silver.
It was nearly midday when I awoke. The whole world had changed
as under some enchantment; there was brilliant sun and afresh
stimulating air with the salt breath of the sea in it. Old
Andrew gave me some breakfast and a message.
His manner like everything else seemed to have undergone some
transformation. He was silent and, I thought, evasive. He
repeated the message without comment, as though he had committed
it to memory from an unfamiliar language:
"The master directed me to say that he must make a journey to
Oban. It is urgent business and will not be laid over."
"When does my uncle return," I said.
The old man shifted his weight from one foot to the other; he
looked out through the open window onto the strip of meadow
extending into the loch. Finally he replied
"The master did not name the hour of his return."
I did not press the interrogation. I felt that there was
something here that the old man was keeping back; but I had an
impression of equal force that he ought to be allowed the run of
his discretion with it. Besides, the brilliant morning had swept
out my sinister impressions.
I got my cap and stick from the rack by the door and went out.
The house was within a hundred paces of the loch, in a place of
wild beauty on a bit of moor, yellow with gorse, extending from
the great barren mountains behind it right down into the water.
Immense banners of mist lay along the tops of these mountain
peaks, and streams of water like skeins of silk marked the deep
gorges in dazzling whiteness.
The loch was a crooked finger of the sea hooked into the land.
It was clear as glass in the bright morning. The open sea was
directly beyond the crook of the finger, barred out by a nest of
needlepointed rocks. On this morning, with the sea motionless,
they stood up like the teeth of a harrow, but in heavy weather I
imagined that the waves covered them. To the eye they were not
the height of a man above the level water; they glistened in the
brilliant sun like a sheaf of black pikes.
This was Saint Conan's Landing, and it occurred to me that if the
holy man came in rough weather from the Irish coast he required,
in truth, all the perspicacity of a saint to get his boat in
without having it impaled on these devil's needles.
There was no garden to speak of about the house. It was grown up
like the moor. Two or three images of Buddhas stood about in it;
one of them was quite large - three feet in height I should say
at a guess. They were on rough stone pedestals. I examined them
carefully. They were all defective; the large one had an immense
flaw in the shoulder. The gorse nearly covered them; the unkept
hedge let the moor in and there were no longer any paths, except
one running to the boathouse.
I did not follow the path. But I looked down at the boathouse
with some interest. This was the building that my uncle had
turned into a sort of foundry for his weird experiments. There
was a big lock on the door and a coal-blacked chimney standing
above the roof.
It was afternoon. The whole coast about me was like an
undiscovered country. I hardly knew in what direction to set out
on my exploration. I stood in the path digging my stick into the
gravel and undecided. Finally I determined to cross the bit of
moor to the high ground overlooking the loch. It was the sloping
base of one of the great peaks and purple with heather. It
looked the best point for a full sweep of the sea and the coast.
I jumped the hedge and set out across the moor to the high
ground.
There was no path through the gorse, but when I reached the
heather where the foot of the mountain peak descended into the
loch there was a sort of newly broken trail. The heather was
high and dense and I followed the trail onto the high ground
overlooking the sweep of the coast.
The loch was dappled with sun. The air was like wine. The
mountains above the moor and the heather were colored like an
Oriental carpet. I was full of the joy of life and swung into an
immense stride, when suddenly a voice stopped me.
"My lad," it said, "which one of the Ten Commandments is it the
most dangerous to break?"
Before me, at the end of the trail, seated on the ground, was a
big Highlander. He was knitting a woolen stocking and his
needles were clicking like an instrument. I was taken off my
feet, but I tried to meet him on his ground.
"Well," I answered, "I suppose it would be the one against
murder, the sixth."
"You suppose wrong," he replied. "It will be the first. You will
read in the Book how Jehovah set aside the sixth. Aye, my lad,
He ordered it broken when it pleased Him. But did you ever read
that He set aside the first or that any man escaped who broke
it?"
He spoke with the deep rich burr of his race and with a structure
of speech that I cannot reproduce here.
"Did you observe," he added, "the graven images that your uncle
has set up? . . . Where is the man the noo?"
"He is gone to Oban," I said.
He sprang up and thrust the stocking and needles into his
sporran.
"To Oban!" He stood a moment in some deep reflection. "There
will be ships out of Oban." Then he put another question to me:
"What did auld Andrew say about it?"
"That my uncle was gone to Oban," I answered, "and had set no
time for his return."
He looked at me queerly for a moment, towering above me in the
deep heather.
"Do you think, my lad, that your uncle could be setting out for
heathen parts to learn the witch words for his hell business in
the boathouse?"
The suggestion startled me. The thing was not beyond all
possibility.
But I felt that I had come to the end of this examination. I was
not going to be questioned further like a small boy overtaken on
the road I had answered a good many questions and I determined to
ask one.
"Who are you?" I said. "And what have you got to do with my
uncle's affairs?"
He cocked his eye at me, looking down as one looks down at a
child.
"The first of your questions," he said, "you will find out if you
can, and the second you cannot find out if you will." And he was
gone, striding past me in the deep heather.
"I have some business with your uncle, of a pressing nature," he
called back. "I will just take a look through Oban, the night
and the morn's morn."
I was utterly at sea about the big Highlander. He might be a
friend or an enemy of my uncle. But clearly he knew all about
the man and the mysterious experiment in which he was engaged.
He was keeping the place well within his eye; that was also
evident. From his seat in the heather the whole place was spread
out below him.
And his queer speech fitted with old Andrew's fear. Surely the
Buddha was a heathen image and my uncle had set it up. The stern
Scotch conscience would be outraged and see the Decalogue
violated in its injunctions. This would explain the dread with
which my uncle's house was regarded and the reason I could find
no man to help me on the way to it. But it would not explain my
uncle's apprehension.
But my adventure on this afternoon did not end with the big
Highlander. I found out something more.
I returned along the edge of the loch and approached the
boathouse from the waterside.
Here the path passed directly along the whole wall of the
building. The path was padded with damp sod, and as it happened
I made no sound on it. It was late afternoon, the shadows were
beginning to extend, there was no wind and the whole world was
intensely quiet. Midway of the wall I stopped to listen.
The house was not empty. There was some one in it. I could hear
him moving about.
It was of no use to try to look in through the wall; every joint
and crack of the stones was plastered. I went on.
Old Andrew was about setting me some supper. He came over and
stood a moment by the window looking at the shadows on the loch.
And I tried to take him unaware with a sudden question:
"Has my uncle returned from Oban?"
But I had no profit of the venture.
"The master," he said, "is where he went this morning."
The strange elements in this affair seemed on the point of
converging upon some common center. The thing was in the air.
Old Andrew voiced it when he went out with his candle.
"Ah, sir," he said, "it was the fool work of an old man to bring
you into this affair. The master will have his way and he must
meet what waits for him at the end of it."
I saw how he hoped that my visit might interrupt some plan that
my uncle was about to put into effect, but realized that it was
useless.
Clearly my uncle had not left the place; he had been at work all
day in the boathouse. The journey was to account to me for his
disappearance. I had passed the lie along to the queer sentinel
that sat watching in the heather and I wondered whether I had
sent a friend or an enemy into Oban on an empty mission, and
whether I had fouled or forwarded my uncle's enterprise.
I put out the candle and sat down by the window to keep watch,
for the boathouse, the loch and the open sea were under the sweep
of it. But, alas, Nature overreaches our resolves when we are
young. It was far into the night when I awoke.
A wind was coming up and I think it was the rattle of the window
that aroused me. There was no moon, but under the open stars the
world was filled with a thin, ghostly light, and the scene below
the window was blurred a little like an impalpable picture.
A low-masted sailing ship lay in the open sea; there was a boat
at the edge of the loch, and human figures were coming out of the
boathouse with burdens which they were loading into the boat.
Almost immediately the boat, manned with rowers, turned about and
silently traversed the crook of the loch on its way to the ship.
But certain of the human figures remained. They continued
between the boathouse and the beach.
And I realized that I had opened my eyes on the loading of a
ship. The boat was taking off a cargo."
Something stored in the boathouse was being transferred to the
hold of the sailing ship. The scene was inconceivably unreal.
There was no sound but the intermittent puffs of the wind, and
the figures were like phantoms in a sort of lighted mist.
Directly as I looked two figures came out of the boathouse and
along the path to the drawing-room door under my window. I took
off my shoes and crept carefully out of the room and down the
stairway. The door from the hall into the long, low room was
ajar. I stood behind it, and looked in through the crack.
My uncle was burning letters and papers in the fireplace with a
candle, and in the chair beyond him sat the strangest human
creature that I had ever seen in the world.
He was a big Oriental with a sodden, brutal face fixed as by some
sorcery into an expression of eternal calm. He wore the uniform
of an English skipper. It was dirty and sea-stained as though
picked up at some sailor's auction. He was speaking to my uncle
and his careful precise sentences in the English tongue, coming
from the creature, seemed thereby to take on added menace.
"Is it wise, Sahib," he said, "to leave any man behind us in this
house?"
"We can do nothing else," replied my uncle.
The Oriental continued with the same carefully selected words:
"Easily we can do something else, Sahib," he said, "with a bar of
pig securely lashed to the ankles, the sea would receive them."
"No, no," replied my uncle, busy with his letters and the candle.
The big Oriental did not move.
"Reflect, Sahib," he went on. "We are entering an immense peril.
The thing that will be hunting us has innumerable agencies
everywhere in its service. If it shall discover that we have
falsified its symbols, it will search the earth for us. And what
are we, Sahib, against this thing? It does not die, nor wax old,
nor grow weary."
"The lad knows nothing," replied my uncle, "and old Andrew will
keep silent."
"Without trouble, Sahib," the creature continued, "I can put the
young one beyond all knowledge and the old one beyond all speech.
Is it permitted?"
My uncle got up from the fireplace, for he had finished with his
work.
"No," he said, "let there be an end of it."
He turned about, and under the glimmer of the candle I could see
that the man had changed; his big pale face was grim with some
determined purpose, and there was about him the courage and the
authority of one who, after long wavering, at last hazards a
desperate venture. He broke the-glass box and put the Buddha
into his pocket.
"It is good silver," he said, "and it has served its purpose."
The Oriental got softly onto his feet like a great toy of cotton
wood. His face remained in its expression of equanimity, and he
added no further word of gesture to his argument.
My uncle held the door open for him to pass out, and after that
he extinguished the candle and followed, closing the door
noiselessly behind him.
The thing was like a scene acted in a playhouse. But it
accomplished what the playhouse fails in. It put the fear of
death into one who watched it. To me in the dark hall, looking
through the crack of the door, the placid Oriental in his English
uniform, and with his precise words like an Oxford don, was
surely the most devilish agency that ever urged the murder of
innocent men on an accomplice.
The wind was continuing to rise and the mist now covered the loch
and the open sea. It was of no use to stand before the window,
for the world was blotted out. I was cold and I lay down on the
bed and wrapped the covers around me. It seemed only a moment
later when old Andrew's hand was on me, and his thin voice crying
in the room.
"Will you sleep, sir, and God's creatures going to their death!"
He ran, whimpering in his thin old voice, down the stair, and I
followed him out of the house into the garden.
It was midmorning. A man was standing before the door, his hands
behind him, looking out at the sea. In his long trousers and
bowler hat I did not at once recognize him for the Highlander of
my yesterday's adventure.
The coast was in the tail of a storm. The wind boomed, as though
puffed by a bellows, driving in gusts of mist.
The ship I had seen in the night was hanging in the sea just
beyond the crook of the loch. It fluttered like a snared bird.
One could see the crew trying every device of sail and tacking,
but with all their desperate ingenuities the ship merely hung
there shivering like a stricken creature.
It was a fearful thing to look at. Now the mist covered
everything and then for a moment the wind swept it out, and all
the time, the silent, deadly struggle went on between the trapped
ship and the sea running in among the needles of the loch. I
don't think any of us spoke except the Highlander once in comment
to himself.
"It's Ram Chad's tramp . . . . So that's the craft the man was
depending on!"
Then the mist shut down. When it lifted, the doom of the ship
was written. It was moving slowly into the deadly maw of the
loch.
Again the mist shut down and, when again the wind swept it out,
the ship had vanished.
There was the open sea and the long swells and the murderous
current boiling around the sharp points of the needles; but there
was no ship nor any human soul of the crew. Old Andrew screamed
like a woman at the sight.
"The ship!" he cried. "Where is the ship and the master?"
The thing was so swift and awful that I spoke myself.
"My God!" I said. "How quickly the thing they feared destroyed
them!"
The big Highlander came over where I stood. The burr of his
speech and its sacred imagery were gone with his change of dress.
"No," he said, "they escaped the thing they feared . . . . What
do you think it was?"
"I don't know," I answered. "The creature in the English uniform
said that it did not die, nor wad old, nor grow weary."
"Ram Chad was right," replied the Highlander. "The British
government neither dies, ages, nor tires out. Do you realize
what your uncle was doing here?"
"Molding images of Buddha," I said.
"Molding Indian rupees," he retorted.
"The Buddha business was a blind . . . . I'm Sir Henry Marquis,
Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard .
. . . We got track of him in India."
Then he added:
"There's a hundred thousand sterling in false coin at the, bottom
of the loch yonder!"
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