A man may live all his days without finding his true vocation, and it is often accident that reveals it to him. Herschel might have ended his days a music master only for chance, and Du Maurier towards the finish of his life found that he had been all his life a novelist without knowing it.
Some years ago my friend John Sargenson found on the beach near Dover an old red satin shoe that had been washed ashore tied to a bundle of papers. I have told the story elsewhere and how, brooding over these things, and by powers of analysis and synthesis rarely linked in one brain, he solved the riddle and brought a murderer to justice.
He didn’t continue in the business. He is a very rich man, and God’s beautiful world offers him better objects of pursuit than the crook and criminal; all the same, a year after the shoe business, accident brought him again in touch with a problem. He took the thing up, followed it to its solution and now he wishes he hadn’t. This is the story as he told me it.
II
I don’t know what it is about travelling that palls on one so much if one is travelling alone, maybe it’s the fact that the perfectly friendly people one meets are dead strangers to one, for all their conversation and close propinquity; a sea and land journey round the world is, in this respect, nothing more than a magnified bus ride, passengers getting in and out, talking together and so forth, but dead to one another once the destination is reached.
It was at Rangoon that this great fact hit me, and incidentally laid the keel of the yarn I promised to tell you. I was suddenly fed up with boats, trains, hotels and strangers, homesick down to the heels of my boots, and wanting some place of my own to hide in; anything, even a shack in the jungle. It was the queerest feeling, and one day when it was gripping me hard, I fell in talk in the hotel bar with an old saltwater chap by name of Boston, who owned boats on the Irawadi and a couple of deep-sea schooners. I told him what was in my mind and he understood. He took me by the arm and led me off down to the river, and pointing out a schooner tied up to the wharf:
“There you are,” said he, “that’s what you want; she’s in ballast and ready for sea. She’s mine. Buy her, or rent her. She’s a hundred and ten tons and nothing can break her, best sea boat in these waters; she’ll take you to Europe safer than the mails, and I’ll get you a skipper and crew inside the week.”
An hour after I had closed, and the Itang—that was her name—was mine. I’d found a home. A week later I was off, slipping down the Irawadi with the land breeze into the Gulf of Martaban, bound for Europe?—oh Lord, no! I was homesick no longer; Europe might have gone off the map as far as I was concerned, for the Pacific was calling me.
We sailed south down by the Andamans and through the Straits of Malacca, past Java and Flores, into the Banda Sea, tinkered about amongst the islands and then came through Torres Straits; it was May and the south-east monsoon was blowing—you can’t get through that place when the north-west is on, because of the fogs—then steering north by the Louisiades, we passed the Solomons, touched at several of the Carolines and pushed on till we were about half-way between the Ladrones and Wake Island just under 20° North.
That’s where the happening took place.