Mr American. George Fraser MacDonald
would have had difficulty in defining.
He ate an excellent breakfast in the cosy coffee-room, sitting at a little window table and watching the constant stream of traffic and pedestrians in the street outside. He deliberately ate slowly, conscious of a mounting feeling of excitement – which he found strange in himself, for he was not normally an excitable man. Then he returned to the lobby, and questioned the attentive porter.
“Guide books to London and East Anglia, sir? Sure, now I can get those for you. And a large-scale map of the county of Norfolk?” The porter’s eyebrows rose a fraction. “You’ll want the ordnance survey – yes, I dare say I can get that, too. It may take an hour or so, but if you’re going out … you are, for a look at the town. Capital, sir.”
Mr Franklin thanked him, and set off to tour the city on foot, content to walk at random, watching and listening, standing on street corners to observe the passing crowds, trying to accustom his ear to the strange, soft mumbling accent of the Liverpudlians, observing the magisterial police on traffic duty, spending five minutes listening to an altercation between a stout woman and a street trader, riding on an electric tram and on the famous overhead railway, and generally presenting the appearance of an interested wanderer absorbing the sights and sounds around him.
He lunched in a public house off soup and sandwiches, washed down by a pint of heavy dark beer which he found rather cloyingly sweet, spent another couple of hours in apparently aimless strolling, and returned to the Adelphi as dusk was falling. There he dined, and after calculating that the five shillings, or one dollar, which the dinner cost, still left him with a comfortable balance from the ten dollars which, the Mauretania’s purser had assured him, was all that a first-class traveller need spend per day in England, retired to his room.
Here the guide books which the porter had obtained were waiting for him, but he ignored them in favour of the large ordnance survey map of Norfolk, which he spread out on the bed and began to examine with close attention. For half an hour he pored over it, the dark face intent as he traced over the fine print and symbols denoting such detailed items as railway cuttings, plantations, marshes, forest paths, churches with spires (and with towers), historic sites, and the like, and the quaint, pastoral place-names, Attleborough, Sheringham, Swaffham, Methwold, and Castle Lancing.
Mr Franklin smiled, and lay down on the bed, and for another half-hour he was quite still, stretched out, hands behind his head, the dark grey eyes staring up at the ceiling, the gentle mouth beneath the black moustache slightly open. An onlooker would have thought he was asleep, but presently he came swiftly to his feet, and went purposefully to the work of undressing and preparing himself for bed.
He unpacked his few toilet articles from his valise, took off his jacket, removed the money-belt round his waist and methodically counted its contents – one hundred and ninety-eight gold sovereigns, which was a considerable sum, even for a transatlantic passenger, and had caused the American Express clerk in New York to purse his lips doubtfully when Mr Franklin, changing his dollars, had insisted on carrying so much on his person. If Inspector Griffin, or the Irish head porter, had been privileged to peep into Mr Franklin’s room they, too, might have been mildly surprised. But they would not have thought anything particularly out of the way until the moment when Mr Franklin, having stood for several minutes contemplating his battered trunk where it stood against the wall, gave way apparently to a sudden impulse, and unbuckled the straps which secured it. Even then there was nothing strange in his behaviour, or in the way he paused, glancing round the room with its homely fittings, the shaded light, the marble wash-stand with its bowl and ewer, the floral wallpaper and patterned carpet, the little notice informing guests of mealtimes and fire precautions; nor even in the way he meditatively touched the linen pillow and embroidered bed-spread, like a man reassuring himself of his surroundings, before he turned to the trunk again and threw back the lid.
At that point they might have taken notice, for the contents of Mr Franklin’s trunk were, to say the least, slightly unusual for a guest in a Liverpool hotel. Not that there was anything about them to excite Inspector Griffin’s professional attention; there was no contraband, no illicit goods, nothing to which, in those easygoing days, even a law officer could have taken exception, although he might have made a mental note that Mr Franklin was a man of unusual background and, possibly, behaviour.
The principal object in the trunk, taking up most of its space, was a saddle – but the kind of saddle that would have made an English hunting squire rub his eyes and exclaim with disgust. It was what the Mexicans call a charro saddle, heavily ornamented and studded with metal-work, very high both before and behind, and therefore a sure recipe (in the eyes of the English squire) for a broken pelvis if its owner were unwise enough to use it over hedges. There was also a blanket, of Indian pattern, neatly folded, and a heavy canvas slicker, or cape; a very worn and stained wideawake hat, a pair of heavy leather gauntlets, a pair of battered boots in sore need of repair, a large drinking mug of cheap metal, and several packets of papers done up in oil-skin.
Mr Franklin, squatting in front of the trunk in his long underwear – he had discarded his newly-bought nightshirt on the first day of his voyage – handled each item in turn, very carefully, running his long fingers over their surfaces, caressingly almost as a man will handle old things which are familiar friends. He spun the big rowels on the spurred boots and put them back, smiling a little, rapped his knuckle on the mug, balanced the packets of papers in his hands, and restored them to their places. There were half a dozen books in the trunk; he leafed through them slowly – Old Mortality, Oliver Twist, Humphrey Clinker, Baedeker’s Guide to England, the 1897 edition; the poetical works of Wordsworth, George Borrow’s Lavengro, Huckleberry Finn, the complete works of Shakespeare.
He read the fly-leaf on the Shakespeare, although he knew the inscription off by heart, the spidery writing in faded ink: “To Luke Franklin, in the earnest hope that he may find profit, pleasure, and peace of mind in its pages, from his affectionate father”. The signature was “Jno. Franklin, 1858”. His grandfather’s gift to his own father; he could hear the old man’s voice reading from it – Luke Franklin had loved best of all to recite Falstaff’s part, chuckling over the grosser jests, rolling Shakespeare’s rich periods over his tongue … “when I was of thy years I was not an eagle’s talon in the waist; I could have crept me into any alderman’s thumb ring.” He had wondered what an alderman was, and Luke Franklin had told him, on a soft and starry summer night when they camped on the road to El Paso; he had been just a boy then, lying staring into the fire, listening while his father explained that it was a corruption of “eolderman”, an old English word – “it’s the same as elder, an elder man, an alderman, who is a kind of city councilman back in England. They still have them there.” His father had resumed his reading aloud, and the boy had gone to sleep, to awake in the pearly dawn, beside a dead fire, with his father still croaking away through the Battle of Shrewsbury, oblivious of time and place, lost in the magic of the play.
Mr Franklin sighed. Shakespeare and he had travelled some long roads since then, into some strange places. There had been the time in the silver camp when he had read Othello to a group of amusement-starved miners, and old Davis, his partner, had burst out: “Why, that damnfool nigger! Couldn’t he have asked around? Couldn’t he see they were makin’ a jackass out of him?” Or the night in Hole-in-the-Wall when he had lent the book to Cassidy, the last man on earth who might have been expected to appreciate the Swan of Avon, but he had studied away at it, the broad, beefy face frowning as he spelled out the words, and Franklin had caught the whispered mutter: “Before these eyes take themselves to slumber, I’ll do good service, or lie in the ground for it, aye, or go to death. But I’ll pay it as valorously as I may. That will I surely do.” Yes, Cassidy might never have heard of Harfleur or the Salic Law, but he could understand that kind of talk, all right. Wonder where he was now? Where were any of them, for that matter?
Well, he was here, in Liverpool, Lancashire County, England, quarter of the way round the world from Hole-in-the-Wall, or El Paso, or the Tonopah diggings, or the Nebraska farm that he could barely remember. Already it seemed far away, that other world, in mind as well as distance. Only the instinct of the wanderer, whose home and effects travelled with him, whose whole being could be contained in one old trunk, had prompted him to hold on to