Elliott had expected to find an Oriental city; he had looked for a sort of maze of black alleys, ivory lattices, temples, minarets, and a medley of splendour and squalor; but in his surprise at the reality he said that Bombay was almost like an American city. There was squalor and splendour enough, but they were not as he had imagined them; and at the first sight of the wide, straight, busy streets he felt a great relief, realizing that his detective work would not have to be pursued under such “Arabian Night” conditions as he had anticipated.
At the landing-stage he surrendered himself to a white-robed and barefoot native runner, who claimed to represent Ward’s Anglo-Indian Hotel, and this functionary at once bundled him into a ricksha which started off at a trot. So unfamiliar a mode of locomotion revived some of Elliott’s primal expectations of the East, and the crowds that filled the street from house-front to house-front helped to strengthen them. The populace, as Elliott observed with surprise, were nearly as black as the negroes at home, clad in every variety and colour of costume, brilliant as a garden of tulips, and through the dense mass his ricksha man forced a passage by screaming unintelligible abuse at the top of his voice. Occasionally a black victoria clove its slow way past him, bearing a white-clad Englishman, who gazed unseeingly over the swarming mass; and Elliott for the first time breathed the smell of the East, that compound of heat and dust and rancid butter and perspiring humanity that somehow strangely suggests the yellow marigold flowers that hang in limp clusters in the marketplaces of all Bengal.
At the hotel, a gigantic and imposing structure, he was received by a Eurasian in a frock coat and no shoes, who assigned him to a vast bedroom, cool and darkened and almost large enough to play tennis in. Elliott examined the unfamiliar appurtenances with some curiosity, and then took a delicious dip in the bathroom that opened from his chamber. He then changed his clothes and went down-stairs, determined to lose no time in visiting the United States Consulate.
The mate of the Clara McClay, as the only surviving officer, was required to report the circumstances of the loss of his ship to the American consul; and self-interest, as much as law, should equally have impelled him to do so. For by reporting the foundering of the steamer in deep water he would clear himself of responsibility, and at the same time close the case and check any possible investigation into the whereabouts of the wreck.
But Elliott learned at once that the white man in India is not supposed to exert himself. The manager of the house, to whom he applied for information, placed him in a long cane chair while a ricksha was being called, and then installed him in the baby-carriage conveyance, giving elaborate instructions in the vernacular to the native motor. And again the vivid panorama of the streets unrolled before Elliott’s eyes under the blinding sun-blaze,—the closely packed crowd of white head-dresses, the nude torsos, bronze and black, the gorgeous silks, and violent-hued cottons rolling slowly over the earthen pavement that was packed hard by millions of bare feet.
The gridiron shield with the eagle looked home-like to Elliott when he set eyes on it, but he found the official representative of the United States to be a brass-coloured Eurasian, who seemed to have some recollection of the Clara McClay or her mate, but was either unable or unwilling to impart any information. He was the consular secretary; the consul was out at the moment, but he returned just as Elliot was turning away in disappointment. He was a rubicund gentleman of middle age, from Ohio, as Elliott presently learned, and proud of the fact. He wore a broad straw hat of American design—Heaven knows how he had procured it in that land—and, to Elliott’s unbounded amazement, he was accompanied by his own steamer acquaintance, the Alabaman Sevier.
Elliott nodded to Sevier, trying to conceal his consternation, and was for going away immediately, but the secretary was, after all, only too anxious to give assistance.
“Be pleased to wait a moment, sir. This is the consul. Mr. Guiger, this gentleman is asking if we know anything of the position of the mate of the wrecked American steamer, called the Clara McClay.”
“His position? By Jupiter, I wish I knew it!” ejaculated the consul, mopping his face, but showing a more than physical warmth. “This other gentleman here has just been asking me the same thing, and I’ve had a dozen wires from the owners in Philadelphia.”
Elliott was thunderstruck at this revelation of Sevier’s interest in the matter, but it was too late to draw back.