The Sleuth of St. James's Square by Melville Davisson Post (black authors fiction txt) 📕

million square miles of the earth's surface that nobody knows anything about.”

He got a package of American cigarettes out of his pocket, selected one and lighted it with a fragment of the box thrust into the fire.

“That's where Tavor was the last year. When the ambulance picked him up, he'd crawled around the Horn in a Siamese tramp.”

He paused.

“Great people, the English; no fag-out to them. Look how Scott went on in the Antarctic with his feet frozen... It's in the blood; it was in Tavor.

“I sat there that winter night in my room in New York while he told me all about it.

“It was morning when he finished—the milk wagons were on the street,—and then, he added, quite simply, as though it were a matter of no importance,

“'But I can't go back, Barclay, old man; my tramping's over. That was no fit I had on the dock.'

“He looked at me with his dead eyes in his tan-colored plaster face. You've heard of the hemp-chewers and the betel-chewers; well, all that's baby-food to a thing they've got in the Shamo. It's a shredded root, bitter like cactus, and when you chew it, you don't get tired and you don't get hot... you go on and you don't know what the temperature is. Then some day, all at once, you go down, cold all over like a dead man... that time you don't die, but the next time...”

Barclay snapped his fingers without adding the word.'

“And you can calculate when the second one will strike you. It's a hundred and eighty-one days to the hour.”

Then he added:

“That was the first one on the dock. Tavor had six months to live.”

The big man broke the cigarette in his fingers and threw the pieces into the fire. Then he turned abruptly toward me.

“And I know where he wanted to live for those six months. The old dream was still with him. He wanted that country house in his native county in England, with the formal garden and the lackeys. The finish didn't bother him, but he wanted to round out his life with the dream that he had carried about with him.

“I put him to bed and went down into Broadway, and walked about all night. Tavor couldn't go back and he had to have a bunch of money.

“It was no good. I couldn't see it. I went back Tavor was up and I sat him down to a cross examination that would have delighted the soul of a Philadelphia lawyer.”

Barclay paused.

“It was all at once that I saw it—like you'd snap your fingers. It was an accident of Charlie's talk... one of those obiter dicta, that I mentioned a while ago. But I stopped Charlie and went over to the Metropolitan Library; there I got me an expert—an astronomer chap, as it happened, reading calculus in French for fun—I gave him a twenty and I looked him in the eye.

“Now, Professor,' I said, 'this dope's got to be straight stuff, I'm risking money on it; every word you write has got to be the truth, and every line and figure that you put on your map has got to be correct with a capital K.'”

“'Surely,' he said, 'I shall follow Huxley for the text and I shall check the chart calculations for error.'

“'And there's another thing, professor. You've got to go dumb on this job, for which I double the twenty.' He looked puzzled, but when he finally understood me, he said 'Surely' again, and I went back to my apartment.

“'Charlie,' I said, 'how much money would it take for this English country life business?'

“His eyes lighted up a little.

“'Well, Barclay, old man,' he replied, 'I've estimated it pretty carefully a number of times. I could take Eldon's place for six months with the right to purchase for two thousand dollars paid down; and I could manage the servants and the living expenses for another four thousand. I fear I should not be able to get on with a less sum than six thousand dollars.'

“Then,” he added—he was a child to the last—“perhaps Mr. Hardman will now be able to advance it; he promised me 'a further per cent',” those were his words, when the matter was finally concluded.

“Then ten thousand would do?”

“My word,' he said, 'I should go it like a lord on ten thousand. Do you think Mr. Hardman would consider that sum?'

“'I'm going to try him,' I said, 'I've got some influence in a quarter that he depends on.'

“And I went out. I went down to my bank and got twenty U. S. bonds of a thousand each. At five o'clock, the professor had his dope ready—the text and the chart, neatly folded in a big manilla envelope with a rubber band around it. And that evening I went up to see old Nute.”

Barclay got another cigarette. There was a queer cynicism in his big pitted face.

“The church bunch,” he said, “have got a strange conception of the devil; they think he's always ready to lie down on his friends. That's a fool notion. The devil couldn't do business if he didn't come across when you needed him.

“And there's another thing; the old-timers, when they went after their god for a favor, always began by reciting what they'd done for him.... That was sound dope! I tried it myself on the way up to old Nute's apartment on Fifth Avenue.

“I went over a lot of things. And whenever I made a point, I rapped it on the pavement with the ferule of my walking stick; as one would say, 'you owe me for that!'

“You see I was worked up about Tavor. When a man's carried a dream over all the hell he'd pushed through he ought to have it in the end.”

Barclay paused and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.

“You know the swell apartments on Fifth Avenue; no name, only a number; every floor a residence, only the elevators connecting them. I found old Nute in the seventh; and I was bucked the moment I got in.

“The door from the drawing room to the library was open. The Harvard don was going out, the one Nute had employed to get up his thesis for the Royal Society of London—I mentioned him a while ago. And I heard his final remark, flung back at the door. 'What you require, Sir, is the example case of some new exploration—one that you have yourself conducted.'

“That bucked me; the devil was on the job!”

Barclay stopped again. He sat for a moment watching the smoke from the cigarette climb in a blue mist slowly into the beautiful fresco of the ceiling.

“I told old Nute