Tracks in the snow

by Baron Godfrey Rathbone Benson Charnwood

I confess that if I had acted on my own impulse I should have taken my antagonist at his word when he suggested that we should call the nearest policeman. But Callaghan had been taking the lead in our late movements, and I felt that the occasion belonged to Callaghan; and Callaghan was more generous.

“If you have anything to say, sir,” he said, “come to my chambers and say it. Four-wheeler!”

In a moment more we were in a cab—how slow the cab seemed—Callaghan sitting opposite Vane-Cartwright and watching him narrowly lest he should play us a trick, while I too watched him all through the interminable drive, very ill at ease as to the wisdom of our conduct, and wondering what could be the meaning of the unexpected and desperate hazard which our antagonist was now taking. He was evidently going to confess to us. But why? If the knowledge we already possessed was sufficient, as perhaps it was, to secure his conviction, yet he could only partly guess what that knowledge was; of the two most telling pieces of evidence against him, the fact about the window-latch which the surgeon had told us, and the fact that Thalberg had recognised him afar from his window in the hotel, he must have been quite unaware. And then what did he expect to gain by the interview which he had sought with us? What opinion had he formed of the mental weaknesses of the two men with whom he was playing? Was he relying overmuch upon the skill and mastery of himself and others which he would bring to bear in this strange interview? Had the fearful strain under which he had been living of late taken away the coolness and acuteness of his judgment? Could he rely so much upon the chance of enlisting our compassion that he could afford to give us a certainty of his guilt, which, for all he knew, we had not got before, and to throw away the hope of making an escape by flight, which with a man of his resource might easily have been successful? Or had he some other far more sinister hope than that of stirring us to unworthy pity or generosity? I could not resolve these questions, but I was inclined to an explanation which he was himself about to give us. If the cause of suspicion against him became public he would have lost everything for which he greatly cared, and he was ready to risk all upon any chance, however faint, of avoiding this. I was, as I have said, ill at ease about it all. I did not feel that after the conversation I had held with him before, Vane-Cartwright would get over me, but it is an experience which one would do much to avoid, that of listening obdurate to an appeal into which another man puts his whole heart; and more especially would one wish to have avoided consenting to hear that appeal in a manner which might raise false hopes. But for a more serious reason it had been a mistake to acquiesce in this interview; I had learned to know not only Callaghan’s goodness of heart but his cleverness and his promptitude, but I had not learned to credit him with wisdom or with firmness; and the sort of impulsiveness, which had made him at once grant the request for this interview, might easily have further and graver consequences.

At last we were in Callaghan’s room and seated ourselves round a table.

“I see,” said Vane-Cartwright, “that it puzzles you gentlemen why I should ask for this interview. You think I am an ordinary criminal, which perhaps I am, and you thought that like an ordinary criminal I should try all means to save a disgraced life, which I certainly shall not do. I know that you have not got the knowledge which would convict me of murder. I do not suppose you think you have, and in any case you have not. And, if you had, I think you know I have contrivance enough to take myself off and live comfortably out of reach of the law. But I do not care for escape, and I do not care for acquittal. You have the means to throw suspicion on me, and that is enough for me. I cared for honour and success, and I do not care for life when they are lost.” He was looking at each of us alternately with an inscrutable but quite unflinching gaze, but he now hid his eyes, and he added as if with difficulty, “Yet I did care for one other thing besides my position in the world, but that has gone from me too.

“And now,” he resumed, “that my struggle is over, and that the people—more people and bigger people than you would think—who have been courting me for the last twelve months will think of me only with as just abhorrence as Thalberg himself does, I have an odd fancy, and it is this: I should like to stand a little better in the eyes of the very men who, far from courting me, have had the courage to suspect me and the tenacity to drag me down.” He had raised his eyes again, but this time fixed them on Callaghan only, for he doubtless saw that I was out of touch with him, and, seeing this, he had art enough to appear to recognise and acquiesce in it.

“You know something of my story. Let me tell you just a little more of it, and, please, if it interests you enough, question me on any point you will. I shall not shrink from answering. If a man is known to have murdered two of his friends, there cannot be much left that it is worth his while to conceal. First, I would like to speak of my early training. If I had been brought up in the gutter, you could make some allowance for that, and give me some credit for any good qualities I had shown, however cheerfully you might see me hanged for my crimes. It is not usual to suppose that any such allowance may have to be made for a man brought up to luxury and to every sort of refinement, and yet such a man too may be the victim of influences which would kill the good in most characters even more than they have in mine. You may have heard a little about my people, and perhaps know that their views and ways were not quite usual; I am not going to say one word against them (I am not that sort of man, whatever I may be), but there were two things in my boyhood harder for me than the ordinary Englishman can well imagine. I was brought up in the actual enjoyment of considerable wealth and the expectation of really great wealth, and just when I was grown up the wealth and the expectations suddenly vanished. That has happened to many men who have been none the worse for it. But then I was brought up soft. You know I am not a limp man or a coward; but I had all the bringing up of one; cared for hand and foot, never doing a thing for myself (my good people had great ideas of republican simplicity, but they were only literary ideas). None of the games, none of the sport that other boys get; no rubbing shoulders with my equals at school; no comradeship but only the company of my elders, mostly invalids. Few people know what it is to be brought up soft. But there was worse than that. You” (he was addressing Callaghan) “were piously brought up. Oh, yes, you were really. I daresay your home was not a strict one, and you were not carefully taught precepts of religion and morality or carefully shielded from the sight of evil (perhaps quite the contrary, for I have not the pleasure of knowing much about you, Mr. Callaghan), but I am quite sure that you had about you at home or at school, or both, people among whom there was some tacit recognition of right and wrong of some sort as things incontrovertible, and that there was some influence in your childhood which appealed to the heart. But in my childhood nothing appealed to the heart, nothing was incontrovertible, above all, nothing was tacit. Everlasting discussion, reaching back to the first principles of the universe, and branching out into such questions as whether children should be allowed pop-guns. That was my moral training, and that was all my moral training. It was very sound in principle, I daresay—and I am not going to pose as an interesting convert to the religious way of looking at things, for I am not one—but it did not take account of practical difficulties, and it was very, very hard on me. Not one man in ten thousand has had that sort of upbringing, and I do not suppose you can realise in the least how hard that sort of thing is.

“So,” he continued, “I found myself at twenty-one suddenly made poor; more accustomed than most lads to think life only worth living for refinements which are for the wealthy only; taught not to take traditional canons of morality for granted; taught to think about the real utility of every action; landed in a place like Saigon, and thrown in the society of the sort of gentry who, we all know, do represent European civilisation in such places; sent there to get a living; thoroughly out of sympathy with all the tastes and pleasures of the people round me, and at the same time easily able to discover that for all my strange upbringing I was by nature more of a man than any one else there. As a matter of fact, there was only one decent man there with intellectual tastes, and that was Peters; but Peters, who was only two or three years older than I, and, as I own I fancied, nothing like so clever, took me under his protection and made it his mission to correct me, and it did not do. You can easily imagine how, in the three years before Longhurst came on the scene, I had got to hate the prospect of a life of humdrum, money-grubbing among those people in the hope of retiring with a small competence some day when my liver and my brain were gone; you would not have thought any the better of me if I had become content with that. At any rate I did not. I meant to be quit of it as soon as I could, and I meant more. I resolved before I had been three weeks in the place to make money on a scale which would give me the position, the society and the pursuits for which I had been trained. I resolved in fact to make the sort of place for myself in the world which every man, except the three men in this room and Thalberg, thinks I have secured. If I had no scruples as to the way in which I should carry out that resolve, I differed from the people around me only in knowing that I had no scruples, and in having instead a set purpose which I was man enough to pursue through life. And I am man enough, I hope, not to care much for life now that that purpose has failed. If I pursued my end without scruple, I think I was carrying out to its logical conclusion the principles that had been taught me as a boy; and, as I am not going to seek your sympathy on false pretences, let me tell you I do not know to-day that there are any better principles—there may be; I hope there are.

“I waited nearly three years, learning all I could about business and about the East, its trade and its resources, and waiting all the time for my opportunity which I knew would come, and which came. It came to me through Longhurst; but I must go back a little. I have said that Peters was my only equal in our society there. Now let me say, once for all, that in nothing that I am going to tell you do I wish to blame Peters more than I blame myself; but from the first we did not hit it off. Peters, as I have said, took on himself the part of my protector and adviser a little too obviously; he had not quite tact enough to do it well, and I was foolish enough in those days to resent what I thought his patronage. At first there was no harm done; Peters thought I should be the better if I entered more into such sport as there was in the place, for which I had very little taste, and he tried to make me do so by chaffing me about being a duffer, in his blunt way, which I thought rude, and that before other people. You would hardly imagine that I was ever shy, but I was; and, absurd as it seems, this added a good deal to my unhappiness in my new surroundings. I should very soon have got over that, for I soon found my way about the place, and my shyness quickly wore off; but worse than that followed. I was fond of arguing, and used to discuss all things in heaven and earth with Peters. You can easily suppose that his views and mine did not agree, and I daresay now that I pained him a good deal. I did not mean to do that, but I did mean to shock him sometimes, and so I often took a cynical line, by which I meant nothing at all, telling him the sharp things that I should do if I got the chance; and once or twice I was fool enough to pretend that all sorts of things of which Peters would not approve went on in our business. To my amazement I discovered after a time that Peters took all this nonsense seriously. I would have given anything to efface the impression that I had made, for though there are few men that I ever respected, Peters was one of them. But Peters became reserved towards me and impossible to get at. Then gossip came in between us. There is sometimes very spiteful gossip in a little European settlement in the East; and I am certain, though I cannot prove it, that a man there, with whom I had constant business, told Peters a story about a shady transaction which he said I was in. The transaction was real enough, but neither I nor my firm had any more to do with it than you. I know that this man told it to other people, for I have heard so from them, and I do not doubt that that was what finally turned Peters against me. I tried to tax Peters with having picked up this story, but he said something which sounded like disbelieving me, and I lost my temper and broke off; and from that day till we met again at Long Wilton we never exchanged any more words together, though we crossed one another’s path as you shall hear.

“Mind, again, I am not saying it was his fault; but it is in itself doing a young man a very ill turn to show him that you think him dishonest when as yet he is not, and it did me harm. Upon my soul, I was honest then; in fact, in that regard, most of my dealings throughout life would stand a pretty close scrutiny. But I have often thought that I might have become a much better man if Peters would have been my friend instead of suspecting me unjustly; and I confess that it rankles to this day, and all the more because I always respected Peters. After that, however, he did me some practical ill turns, disastrously ill turns; rightly enough, if he thought as he did. I must tell you that our separation came a very little while before Longhurst came to the place. Just afterwards I had an opening, a splendid opening; it would not have made me the rich man that I am, but it would have given me a good position right away, and what it would have saved me you shall judge. A very eminent person came to Saigon; he knew something of Peters and a little of me. He saw a great deal of Peters at Saigon, and he pressed him to accept a post that was in his gift in the Chinese Customs service. Peters refused. I suppose he was at that time thinking of coming home. The great man then spoke to me about it, and had all but offered it to me. How I should have jumped at it! But suddenly it all went off and he said no more to me. I believed that Peters warned him against me; possibly, being sore against Peters, I was mistaken; but at any rate that was what I ever afterwards believed. It was partly in desperate annoyance about this that I plunged into what then seemed my wild venture with Longhurst.