The hunting lodge of Leopold, King of the Belgians—the Château des Ardennes, as it is called—is situate some half a dozen miles from Rochefort, on the road to Dinan on the Meuse. It was a favourite relaxation of mine when I found myself in want of exercise and a holiday, to mount a knapsack and to stroll to Dinan, which is only a score of English miles away. On one of these jaunts I had my only interview with a reigning monarch. I was sauntering homeward in the dusk of a summer's evening when I saw at the gate of the château, a tall, gaunt figure with a long, peaked beard, a pheasant's feather stuck in the ribbon of a bowler hat, and trousers very disreputably trodden into rags behind. As I passed him he raised his hat and gave me a courteous “Bon soir, monsieur.” I returned his salute and answered “Bon soir, sire.” “Ah, ha!” said His Majesty, like a pleased child, “vous me connaissez alors?” I responded that everybody knew the King of the Belgians and I added that I had never ventured to enter His Majesty's dominions without carrying his portrait with me. “Comment donc!” said His Majesty, and when I produced a brand new five-franc piece, the jest enjoyed a greater prosperity than it deserved. We got into conversation on the strength of it and he stood for perhaps five minutes chatting not unintelligently about English books and authors.
The years I spent in Rochefort were, I think, the happiest and most fruitful of my life, but the last piece of work I did there came very near to landing me in a contretemps which might, for a time at least, have had an uncomfortable result. At that time Mr James Payn had just taken over the editorship of the Cornhill magazine, the price of which he had reduced to 6d. My story—By the Gate of the Sea—had been the last to appear in the original series founded by Thackeray, and I was invited by Mr Payn to inaugurate the new and cheaper issue. With this purpose I wrote Rainbow Gold, and since it was Mr Payn's unbreakable editorial rule not to take any work into consideration until its last line was in his hands, and he at this time was in a mighty hurry about his literary supplies, I had to undertake again pretty much such a spell of work as I had undertaken with Val Strange, and with an almost equally unfortunate result. My methods of work have often brought me near a nervous breakdown, and by the time at which Rainbow Gold was finished, I was all but a wreck. It had been arranged between the editor of the Cornhill and myself that the completed copy of my book should be in his hands on a given date, and for some reason I was afraid to trust it to the post, and determined to carry it to London and deliver it with my own hands. For this purpose it was necessary that I should catch the Malle Des Indes early on the Sunday morning at Jemelle two miles away. I had a little leather case constructed, in which to carry my manuscript, and this I had seen more than half completed on the Thursday afternoon. I strolled into the shop of the village cordonnier on Saturday morning to ask why it had not been delivered, and I found the man busy on a duplicate of it which he promised to deliver before the evening. It came out on inquiry that he had sold the case I had ordered to a person who described himself as a commercial traveller, and who was staying at the Chevaux Blancs, a little hotel in the village which was frequented by people of his class. I satisfied myself that the work would be done in time, and when it was delivered in the course of the evening, I naturally supposed that there was an end of the matter. I met the purchaser of my box on the platform at Jemelle, and we travelled by the same train as far as Lille. There I got another momentary glimpse of him and thenceforth saw him no more.
I travelled on to Dover without adventure, but there, as I was quitting the boat, I was encountered by a man who, although he was in plain clothes, was immediately recognisable as a member of the police force. He laid his hand upon my shoulder and said: “I beg your pardon, but I must ask you to accompany me to the Captain's cabin.” I not unnaturally asked him why. He pointed to the box I held and asked if that were my property. I answered of course in the affirmative and he said in quite the official manner that he must trouble me to go with him, and made a motion to relieve me of my burden. I handed the box to him and he conducted me, still with a hand upon my shoulder, to the companion-way. In the captain's cabin I found two or three men who were all very grave, and all very suave and polite. One of them asked me my name, and another whether I had not left the village of Rochefort by such and such a train in the morning. I answered both questions without hesitation, and I noticed that my interlocutor looked a little puzzled. I was asked next what I was carrying in that leathern case, and, by way of answer, I unlocked the box and produced my manuscript. There was a curious restraint visible in the manner of my examiners when I performed this simple action, and I could not in the least understand it at the time, although its reason became clear enough a minute later. “I beg your pardon, Mr Murray,” said the man who had first laid a detaining hand upon me, “there has been a mistake, but we were compelled to do our duty.” He intimated that I was at liberty to go, which in some heat I declined to do, until I had received some explanation of this arrest of a private citizen bound on legitimate affairs. I had missed the tidal train, and I represented that this had caused me some inconvenience.
Then the truth came out The hotel des Chevaux Blancs, in innocent seeming little Roche-fort, had been for some months past a hot-bed of European anarchy. The people who went and came there were surrounded by spies, and the police of Dover had been advised by telegraph, of the departure of a noted anarchist, who was carrying precisely such a box as that in which I had bestowed my manuscript. Before I left Dover, it transpired that a man had been arrested in Folkestone who was carrying with him enough of Atlas dynamite to have wrecked a whole square. The movements of each of us had been watched by the continental police, and had been wired to England. There had been a moment at which the two boxes had been laid on the same bench on the platform at Jemelle, and I have often since pictured to myself the imbroglio which might have ensued if they had been accidentally exchanged. It could not have lasted long in the nature of things, but it would certainly have afforded me a new experience.
I have had a good deal to do with the police in my time, as most working journalists have, and this reminds me of one or two adventures which, if I had preserved a chronological order in my narrative, should have been told earlier. Before I left Birmingham I became acquainted with an officer who afterwards became eminent in the service of Scotland Yard. The fashion in which we were introduced to each other was sufficiently dramatic. It was an hour after midnight in a heavy rain and the place was Pinfold Street, at the back of the premises of the Birmingham Morning News. A bedraggled woman ran shrieking uphill with cries of “help” and “murder,” and behind her staggered a drunken ruffian brandishing a club which, when we came to examine it later, proved to have been sawn from the top of an old-fashioned mahogany bedstead. It was simply rounded at one end and square and heavy at the other, and it would infallibly have done the business of any person with whose head it had come in contact. I was encumbered with a heavy ulster which was buttoned down almost to my feet and I should certainly have been too late to prevent mischief, but just as the pursuer came within striking distance an agile figure darted round the corner and the murderous-minded drunkard dropped like an ox in the shambles at a single blow. The newcomer was a plain-clothes policeman and he had used a pair of handcuffs as a knuckle-duster and had taken the ruffian clean on the point of the chin. I accompanied him and his captor to the Moor Street police station and got a paragraph out of the incident before the paper went to bed.
I saw no more of my plain-clothes man for a month or two and then an odd circumstance threw us together again. My father, who was still carrying on business in West Bromwich, was a letterpress printer only, but he received an occasional order for copperplate and lithographic work which he handed over either to a Mr Storey in Livery Street, or to the firm of W. & B. Hunt in New Street. I had been over to call on him one evening and he had asked me to attend to some slight commission with either of these firms. I called first on the Livery Street man, whose establishment was just outside Snow Hill station, and found him looking at a queer copperplate impression which lay on the counter before him.
“There's something uncommonly queer about this,” he said, “and I don't know that I ought to go on with it; it strikes me very forcibly that an attempt is being made to forge a Russian note and that this is a part of the process.” The lines on the paper made a sort of hieroglyphic puzzle which it was quite impossible to decipher. I asked him what he intended to do with it and he answered that he would fulfil his order and set the police upon the track of the people who had given it. I went on to Messrs Hunt's printing works in New Street and there I found one of the partners poring over what at first sight looked like a replica of the impression I had just seen. I said nothing about the matter and nothing was said to me, but when I had transacted my business and had got out into the street again the first man I encountered was my plain-clothes policeman. I told him that I thought I was on the track of a little bit of business in his line and I took him back into the office of the copperplate printer and introduced him. It had just occurred to me that if the two plates I had seen were accurately registered they might fit into each other and make out a consecutive document, and so in the sequel it proved to be. A gang of Polish forgers had conceived the idea that in a foreign country it would be possible to get two separate engravers to imitate each a portion of a fifty-rouble note and they had made arrangements to do their own printing when they had secured the plates. I made arrangements with my detective that he should bring me first hand and exclusive information with respect to the development of the case and within eight and forty hours he had effected his arrest and I was the only journalist in the town who was allowed to know anything about it. Had I stayed on in Birmingham I might have developed a sort of specialism in this direction, but circumstances drifted me away and it was not until some years later that I met my friend again and found him to be occupying a position on the detective staff at Scotland Yard. He told me how he came there and, in its way, it is one of the most remarkable little stories I remember to have heard.
There was a manufacturing jeweller in Camberwell whose name was Whitehead, who had a showroom somewhere in the neighbourhood of St. Paul's Cathedral. Seventeen years there had been in his employ a commercial traveller in whom he reposed the completest confidence. This traveller had a very pretty turn for the invention of ornamental designs in fgold and precious stones and he was an accomplished draughtsman. In his journeys about the country he carried with him a tray of pinchbeck and of coloured glass, which represented in duplicate a tray of real jewellery and precious stones which was kept under lock and key at the showroom. It happened, whether by accident or design, that the one tray was substituted for the other, the pinchbeck imitations being left in the jeweller's safe and the real thing carried away by the commercial traveller. The fact of the substitution was not discovered for some days and by that time the traveller, following his ordinary route, should have been in Manchester or Liverpool. He was wired to at both places but no reply was received from him. Not a doubt of the man's probity entered into his employer's mind, but when all efforts to trace him had failed the jeweller became alarmed for the safety of his employé and communicated with the police.
Now, as fortune would have it, the young Birmingham detective had been sent up to London at this time and, calling at Scotland Yard, he had put into his hands some copies of the document by which the police were circulating the news of the traveller's disappearance, together with a woodcut reproducing a photograph which had been taken some years before and had willingly been surrendered to Mr. Whitehead by the traveller's wife, who was naturally in great distress concerning him. It was the general impression at the time that he had been decoyed away and murdered for the sake of the valuable property he carried, which was of such a nature that it might easily have been disposed of by the criminal—the gold being melted down and the precious stones being disposed of in the ordinary way of business. At Euston Station that afternoon, on his way back to Birmingham, the provincial detective had one fellow-traveller to whom, but for one singular little circumstance, he would probably have paid no heed whatever. The fellow-traveller had one article of luggage only, but he seemed to be unusually anxious about it. It was a hat-box and when he had placed it on the rack overhead he appeared to be unwilling to leave it out of sight for more than an instant at a time. He arose a score of times to readjust it and when he was not occupied in that way he kept a constant eye upon it. “I'm no great Scripture reader,” said the detective to me, in telling me the story, “but when I was a kid my mother used to read the Bible to me every day and one text came into my mind when I saw that cove so anxious about his hat-box: 'Where the treasure is, there will the heart be also.' It kept coming back into my mind and somehow I got to thinking that if it had not been for certain things about him the man in the carriage would have been very like the man whose portrait and description I had just been looking at. The man described had features of a marked Jewish cast and so had the man in the carriage, but the man described had red hair, thick red eyebrows and a beard and moustache of the same colour. The man in the carriage was clean shaved and his hair and eyebrows were as black as a crow's back, but I had got the idea in my mind and I couldn't get it out again, and when he turned his face sideways to look out of the window the light fell on his cheek and, though the whisker had only just begun to sprout after his last shave, I could see that by nature he was as rusty as a jot. I felt downright certain of him from that very minute. He got out at Rugby, taking his hat-box with him, and as I had no funds with me I was afraid I was going to lose him, but he only went into the refreshment room for a glass of beer and a sandwich and came back with me and travelled comfortably on to Birmingham. There he engaged a room at the Queen's Hotel for the night, and having locked up his hat-box in it he went away to order a supply of clothes and linen, as I found out afterwards. I nipped down to Moor Street and told them what I had to say. I got my authority to act, and when my gentleman got back again, I was there all ready for him with a fellow-officer and we nabbed him at his bedroom door. He nipped out a revolver and tried to shoot himself, but we were too quick for him. We made him give up the key of the hat-box and there, sure enough, was every one of the missing jewels. He had torn the velvet lining out of the case and had thrown everything into it pell-mell and wrapped it up in two or three towels so, I suppose, that the contents of the hat-box couldn't jingle. My getting him was just an accident from start to finish, and if it had not been for that text of Scripture I should never have given the man a second thought, but it was reckoned a smartish capture and it ended in my promotion and my coming here.”