The Complete Works of H. C. McNeile "Sapper". Sapper
from them."
I glanced into the street, and there I saw his confreres. Five haggard, unshaven human derelicts clustered under the shade of a palm tree, eyeing the door of the club hungrily, wolfishly, waiting for this product of a university to share with them some of the proceeds of his find.
"As you see," he continued affably, "they are not quite qualified for election even to the Tampico club." He dismissed the thought of them with a wave of his hand. "Tell me, sir, does the Thames still glint like a silver-grey streak by Chelsea Bridge as the sun goes down? Do the barges still o chugging past Westminster? Do children still sail boats on the Round Pond back London way?"
And for the life of me I could not speak. Suddenly, with overwhelming force, the unutterable pathos of it all had me by t he throat, so that I choked and muttered something about smoke going the wrong way. Hopeless, helpless, unredeemable, MacAndrew had said. Aye—but the tragedy of it; the ghastly, fierce tragedy. Back London way—
With wistful eyes he was staring once more over the wonderful blue of the sea, and he seemed to me as a man who saw visions and dreamed dreams. Dreams of the might have been; dreams of a dead past. And then he pulled himself together and ordered another whisky and soda. He was himself once more— Raymond Blair—drunkard and derelict; and as for me, the moment of overwhelming pity had passed.
I was in Tampico—and facts were facts. But it left its mark—that moment: through all that followed the memory of the haunting tragedy in his face stuck to me. Maybe it made me more tolerant than others were: more tolerant certainly than Jim Maitland. For it was in Tampico that I first met Jim, and Blair was the unwitting cause of it.
It must have been a month or five weeks later. The fortnightly boat had just come in, and I intended to leave Tampico in her next day. It was tea- time, and, as I turned into the club, I saw a stranger lounging on the veranda. And because in the outposts of Empire one does not wait for an introduction, I went up to him and spoke. He rose as I reached him, and I noticed that he was very tall.
"I'd better introduce myself," he said with a faint, rather pleasant drawl. "My name is Maitland—Jim Maitland."
I looked at him with suddenly awakened interest. So this was the man of whom the Assam tea-planter had spoken—the celebrated Jim Maitland who lived and didn't vegetate.
"My name is Leyton," I answered, "and I'm glad to meet you. Several strong men had to be helped to bed a few weeks ago after the shock they got when I said that not only had I never met you, but that I'd actually never heard of you."
He grinned—a slow, lazy grin—and then and there I took to him. And, strange to say, after all these years the memory of him which lives freshest in my mind is the memory of that first evening before I knew him at all.
If I shut my eyes, though it's fifteen years ago, I can still see that immaculately dressed figure—tall, lean and sinewy, the bronzed clean- cut face tanned with years of outdoor life—and clearest of all, the quite unnecessary eyeglass. Of the inward characteristics that went to make up Jim Maitland—of his charm, of his incredible lack of fear, of his great heart, I knew nothing at the time. That knowledge was to come later. On that afternoon in Tampico I saw only the outside man, and, in spite of the eyeglass, I pronounced him good.
"Yes—I know most of the odd corners out here," he said as we sat down, and I rang for a waiter. "Though funnily enough I've never been to Tampico before."
"What's yours?" I said as the waiter appeared.
"Whisky and soda, thanks," he answered, stretching out his long legs in front of him.
"Yes—as I say—I've never been here before. I've just arrived in the boat, and I want to get off in her again tomorrow rather particularly."
A peculiar look, half cynical, half amused, came into his eyes for a moment—a look to the meaning of which I had no clue. And then the amusement and the cynicism changed, I thought, to sadness, but, maybe, I was wrong, and it was only my imagination. Certainly his eyes were expressionless as they met mine over the top of his glass.
"Here's how," he said. "You know this place well?"
"Been here six weeks," I answered. "Going tomorrow myself."
"Six weeks should be enough for you to tell me what I want to know. I joined the Moldavia at Port Said, and struck up an acquaintance with a little woman on board. She was all by herself—extraordinarily helpless, never-been-out-of-England-before type and all that—and she was coming here. In fact, she's come this afternoon by the boat to join her husband. I gather he's a fruit merchant in Tampico on rather a big scale. Well, when we berthed there was no sign of him on the landing. So I took her up to that shack of an hotel, and started to make inquiries. Couldn't find out anything, so I came along here." He put down his glass suddenly and rose. "Hullo! here she is."
I glanced up and saw a sweet-looking girl coming towards us along the dusty street. Her age may have been about twenty-five, but her wonderful freshness was that of a girl of seventeen. And it seemed to me as if Tampico had vanished, and I was standing in an old English garden with the lilac in full bloom.
"Mr. Leyton," murmured Maitland, and I bowed.
She nodded at me charmingly, and then gave him the sweetest and most beseeching of smiles.
"I couldn't wait in the hotel, Jim," she said. "It's a horrible place."
"The Tampico hotel," I laughed, "is not an hotel but a sports club for the insect world."
She sat down daintily, and I thought of the few leather-skinned products of Tampico. And then—why, I know not—I glanced at Jim Maitland. And his eyes were fixed on the girl, with that same strange, baffling expression in them that I had noticed before—the expression that in years to come I was destined to see so often. But at the moment I remember thinking that it was, perhaps, as well that he was going by the boat next day. Strange things are apt to happen in the Tampicos of this world— things which are not ordained by the Law and the Prophets.
Then I realised he was speaking, and recalled my wandering attention to the question before the house.
"He can't have got your letter, Sheila. Or, perhaps, he may be away from the island on business."
"Well, I asked everyone at the hotel, after you went out, but they didn't seem to understand," she said a little tremulously.
The man turned to me.
"Mrs. Blair has lost or temporarily mislaid her husband," he remarked whimsically. "A large reward is offered information as to his whereabouts."
"Blair," I said, puzzled, my mind being busy with fruit merchants of the place. "Blair! I don't seem know the name."
"Raymond Blair," she cried, leaning forward. "Surely you must know him."
And for a moment it seemed to me as if the street behind her and everything within my vision turned black. How long I sat there staring at her foolishly I know not—perhaps but the fraction of a second. A kindly Providence has endowed me with a face which has enabled me to win more money at poker than I have lost, and when I heard myself speaking again in a voice I hardly recognised, her face still wore the same little eager, questioning smile.
"How stupid of me," I remarked steadily. "Raymond Blair! Why— of course. The last time I saw him he was going into the interior of the island, and he did say, if I remember aright, that he might be catching the boat which left a fortnight ago."
I felt the eye behind that eyeglass boring into me, and I wouldn't meet it. In an island where if a man sneezes the fact is known by the whole community in half an hour, the whereabouts of a leading member of society are not a matter of vague conjecture. But she didn't know it, poor child—with her English ideas. And I watched the smile fade from her face, to be replaced by a little pitiful questioning look which she turned on Jim Maitland.
"Perhaps I could go to his house," she said doubtfully. "If you could tell me where it is."
And now I was lying desperately, furiously.
"He was going to have it