He was a highly cultivated type of Andy Johnson, inasmuch as crime with him was not a life purpose, but what is called in business a “side-line.” All of us have our hobbies; the closely confined clerk goes home and roots up his yard to plant flower bulbs or cabbage plants; another fancies fowls; another man collects pewter pots and old brass and the millionaire takes to priceless horses; others of us turn from useful statistics and go broke on novels or poetry or music. Count Fosco was an educated gentleman and the pleasure of life was his purpose; crime and intrigue were his recreations. Andy Johnson was a good business man and wealth producer; murder was the direction in which his private understanding of personal disagreements was exercised and vented. Some men turn to poker playing, which is as wasteful as murder and not half as dignified. Count Fosco is the villain par excellence of novels. I do not remember what he did, because “The Woman in White” is the best novel in the world to read gluttonously at a sitting and then forget absolutely. It is nearly always a new book if you use it that way. When the world is dark, the fates bilious, the appetite dead and the infernal twinges of pain or sickness seem beyond reach of the doctor, “The Woman in White” is a friend indeed.
But the man of men for villains, not necessarily criminals; but the ordinary, every-day, picturesque worthies of good, honest scoundrelism and disreputableness is Sir Robert Louis Stevenson. You can afford conscientiously to stuff ballot boxes in order that his election may be secured as Poet Laureate of Rascals. Leaving out John Silver and Billy Bones and Alan Breck, whom every privately shriven rascal of us simply must honor and revere as giants of courage, cunning and controlled, conscience, Stevenson turned from singles and pairs, and in “The Ebb Tide,” drove, by turns, tandem and abreast, a four-in-hand of scoundrels so buoyant, natural, strong, and yet each so totally unlike the others, that every honest novel reader may well be excused for shedding tears when he reflects that the marvelous hand and heart that created them are gone forever from the haunts of the interestingly wicked. No novelist ever exposed the human nature of rascals as Stevenson did.
Now, lago was not a villain; he was a venomous toad, a scorpion, a mad-dog, a poisonous plant in a fair meadow. There was nobody lago loved, no weakness he concealed, no point of contact with any human being. His sister was Pandora, his brother made the shirt of Nessus, himself dealt in Black Plagues and the Leprosy. The old Serpent was permitted to rise from his belly and walk upright on the tip of his tail when he met Iago, as a demonstration of moral superiority. But think of those three Babes-in-the-Wood villains, skipper Davis, the Yankee swashbuckler and ship scuttler; Herrick, the dreamy poet, ruined by commerce and early love, with his days of remorse and his days of compensatary liquor; and Huish, the great-hearted Scotch ruffian, who chafed at the conventional concealments of trade among pals and never could—as a true Scotchman—understand why you should wait to use a knife upon a victim when promptness lay in the club right at hand—think of them sailing out of Honolulu harbor on the Farallone.
Let who will prefer to have sailed with Jason or Aeneas or Sinbad; but the Farallone and its precious freight of rascality gets my money every time. Think of the three incomparable reprobates afloat, with one case of smallpox and a cargo of champagne, daring to make no port, with over a hundred million square miles of ocean around them, every ten lookout knots of it containing a possible peril! It was simply grand—not pirates, shipwrecks or mutinies could beat that problem. And the pathos of the sixth day, when, with every man Jack of them looking delirium tremens in the face and suspecting each the other, Mr. Huish opened a new case of champagne and—found clear spring water under the French label! The honest scoundrels had been laid by the heels by a common wine merchant in the regular way of business! Oh, gentlemen, there should be honor in business; so that gallant villains can be free of betrayal.
The keynote of these gentlemen is struck in the second chapter, where all three of them writing lies home—Davis and Herrick, sentimental equivocations, Huish the strongest of brag with nobody to send it to. In a burst of weakness Davis tells Herrick what a villain he has been, through rum, and how he can not let his daughter, “little Adar,” know it. “Yes, there was a woman on board,” he said, describing the ship he had scuttled. “Guess I sent her to hell, if there's such a place. I never dared go home again, and I don't know,” he added, bitterly, “what's come to them.”
“Thank you, Captain,” said Herrick, “I never liked you better!”
Is it not in human nature to cuddle to a great sheepish murderer like that, who groans in secret for his little girl—if even the girl was truth? I think she turned out a myth, but he had the sentiment.
Was there ever a more melancholy, remorse-stricken wretch than Cap'n Davis? Or a gentler and seedier poet than Herrick? Or a more finely sodden and soaked old rum sport than Huish (not—Whish!) But it was not until they fell in with Attwater that their weakness as scoundrels was exposed. Attwater was so splendidly religious! He was determined to have things right if he had to have them so by bloodshed; he saved souls by bullets. Things were right when they were as he thought they should be. And believing so, with Torquemada, Alexander Sixtus and other most religious brethren, he was ready to set up the stake and fagot and cauterize sin with fire. One thing you can say about the religious folks that are big with cocksureness and a mission—they may make mistakes, but the mistake doesn't talk and criticise.