I have said that when I smelt tobacco I felt that I was, as the children say, “getting warmer.” But, unfortunately, tobacco in the shape of pipe, cigar, or cigarette is in my mouth whenever I have an excuse for the indulgence, and often when I have none. Hence, though the face I sought seemed more than once to loom out at me through tobacco smoke, I had watched too many faces through that pleasing mist to be able to recall the particular circumstances under which I had seen the one in question. Nevertheless, it was tobacco which ultimately gave me my clue.
The morning was very windy, and I had three times unsuccessfully essayed to light my cigar with an ordinary match. In despair—for in a general way I hate fusees like poison—I bought a box of vesuvians which an observant and enterprising match-vendor promptly thrust under my nose. As I struck the vile thing and the pestilent smell assailed my nostrils, the scene I was seeking to recall came back to me. I was sitting in a third-class smoking carriage on the London, Tilbury, and Southend Railway, and opposite to me was a little talkative man who had previously lit his pipe with a fusee. I saw him take out the box evidently with the intention of striking another, and then I heard a voice say, “For heaven’s sake, sir, don’t stink the carriage out again with that filthy thing! Pray allow me to give you a match.”
The speaker was sitting directly in front of me, and as I recalled his face while I stood there in the street with the still unlighted cigar between my lips, the open box in one hand and the now burnt-out fusee arrested half-way toward the cigar-tip in the other, I knew that his face was the face of Captain Shannon.
CHAPTER VI
I MAKE UP MY MIND TO FIND CAPTAIN SHANNON
The striking of that fusee was a critical moment in my life, for before the thing had hissed itself into a black and crackling cinder I had decided to follow up the clue which had been so strangely thrown in my way. My principal reason for so deciding was that I wanted a rest—the rest of a change of occupation, not the rest of inaction. I am by profession what George Borrow would have called “one of the writing fellows.” But, much as I love my craft, and generous and large-hearted as I have always found literary men—at all events, large-brained literary men—to be, I cannot profess much admiration for the fussy folk who seem to imagine that God made our world and the infinite worlds around it, life and death, and the human heart, with its joys and sorrows and hope of immortality, for no other reason than that they should have something to write about.
Instead of recognising that it is only life and the unintelligible mystery of life which make literature of any consequence, they seem to fancy that literature is the chief concern and end of man’s being. As a matter of fact, literature is to life what a dog’s tail is to his body—a very valuable appendage; but the dog must wag the tail, not the tail the dog, as some of these gentry would have us to believe. The dog could, at a pinch, make shift to do without the tail, but the tail could under no circumstances do without the dog.
You may screw a pencil into one end of a pair of compasses and draw as many circles of different sizes as you please, but it is from the other end that you must take your centres, and what the pivot end is to the pencil, life must be to literature.
Hence it is my habit every now and then to put away from me all that is connected with books and the making of books, and to seek only to live my life, and to possess my own soul and this wonderful world about us.
At the particular date of which I am writing, the restlessness which is so often associated with the literary temperament was upon me. I craved change, excitement, and adventures, and these the following up of the clue which I held to the identity of Captain Shannon promised in abundance.
As everything depended upon the assumption that James Mullen was, as was stated, Captain Shannon, the first question which I felt it necessary seriously to consider was whether the informer’s evidence was to be credited; and I did not lose sight of the fact that his confessions, so far from being entitled to be regarded as bona fide evidence, were to be received with very grave suspicion. At the best they might be nothing more than the invention of one who had no information to give, but who hoped by means of them either to prevent, or at least to stave off for a time, the otherwise inevitable death sentence which was hanging over his head.