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

meadow across the dark, creeping river, to the white shaft rising beyond the wooded hills into the sky.

The war was over. I was a guest of Sir Henry Marquis for a week-end at his country-house. The man fascinated me. He seemed a sort of bottomless Stygian vat of mysteries. He had been the secret hand of England for many years in India. Then he was made a Baronet and put at the head of England's Secret Service at Scotland Yard.

A servant brought out the tea and we were alone on the grass terrace before the great oak-trees. He remained for some moments in reflection, then he replied:

“Do you mean the mystery of his death?”

“Was there any other mystery?” I said.

He looked at me narrowly across the table.

“There was hardly any mystery about his death,” he said. “The man shot himself with an old dueling pistol that hung above the mantel in his library. The family, when they found him, put the pistol back on the nail and fitted the affair with the stock properties of a mysterious assassin.

“The explanation was at once accepted. The man's life, in the public mind, called for an end like that. St. Alban after his career, should by every canon of the tragic muse, go that way.”

He made a careless gesture with his fingers.

“I saw the disturbed dust on the wall where the pistol had been moved, the bits of split cap under the hammer, and the powder marks on the muzzle.

“But I let the thing go. It seemed in keeping with the destiny of the man. And it completed the sardonic picture. It was all fated, as the Gaelic people say.... I saw no reason to disturb it.”

“Then there was some other mystery?” I ventured.

He nodded his big head slowly.

“There is an ancient belief,” he said, “that the hunted thing always turns on us. Well, if there was ever a man in this world on whom the hunted thing awfully turned, it was St. Alban.”

He put out his hand.

“Look at the shaft yonder,” he said, “lifted to his memory, towering over the whole of this English country, and cut on its base with his services to England and the brave words he said on that fatal morning on the Channel boat. Every schoolboy knows the words:

“'Don't threaten, fire if you like!'

“First-class words for the English people to remember. No bravado, just the thing any decent chap would say. But the words are persistent. They remain in the memory. And it was a thrilling scene they fitted into. One must never forge that: The little hospital transport lying in the Channel in a choppy sea that ran streaks of foam; the grim turret and the long whaleback of a U-boat in the foam scruff; and the sun lying on the scrubbed deck of the jumping transport.

“Everybody was crowded about. St. Alban was in the center of the human pack, in a pace or two of clear deck, his injured arm in a sling; his split sleeve open around it; his shoulders thrown back; his head lifted; and before him, the Hun commander with his big automatic pistol.

“It's a wonderful, spirited picture, and it thrilled England. It was in accord with her legends. England has little favor of either the gods of the hills or the gods of the valleys. But always, in all her wars, the gods of the seas back her.”

The big Baronet paused and poured out a cup of tea. He tasted it and set it down on the table.

“That's a fine monument,” he said, indicating the white shaft that shot up into the cloudless evening sky. “The road makes a sharp turn by it. You have got to slow up, no matter how you travel. The road rises there. It's built that way; to make the passer go slow enough to read the legends on the base of the monument. It's a clever piece of business. Everybody is bound to give his tribute of attention to the conspicuous memorial.

“There are two faces to the monument that you must look at if you go that road. One recounts the man's services to England, and the other face bears his memorable words:

“'Don't threaten, fire if you like!'”

The Baronet fingered the handle of his teacup.

“The words are precisely suited to the English people,” he said. “No heroics, no pretension, that's the whole spirit of England. It's the English policy in a line: We don't threaten, and we don't wish to be threatened by another. Let them fire if they like,—that's all in the game. But don't swing a gun on us with a threat. St. Alban was lucky to say it. He got the reserve, the restraint, the commonplace understatement that England affects, into the sentence. It was a piece of good fortune to catch the thing like that.

“The monument is tremendous. One can't avoid it. It's always before the eye here, like the White Horse of Alfred on the chalk hill in Berkshire. All the roads pass it through this countryside. But every mortal thing that travels, motor and cart, must slow up around the monument.”

He stopped for a moment and looked at the white needle shimmering in the evening sun.

“But St. Alban's greatest monument,” he said, “was the lucky sentence. It stuck in the English memory and it will never go out of it. One wouldn't give a half-penny for a monument if one could get a phrase fastened in a people's memory like that.”

Sir Henry moved in his chair.

“I often wonder,” he said, “whether the thing was an inspiration of St. Alban's that morning on the deck of the hospital transport, or had he thought about it at some other time? Was the sentence stored in the man's memory, or did it come with the first gleam of returning consciousness from a soul laid open by disaster? I think racial words, simple and unpretentious, may lies in any man close to the bone like that to be rived out with a mortal hurt. That's what keeps me wondering about the words he used. And he did use them.

“I don't doubt that a lot of our hero stuff has been edited after the fact. But this sentence wasn't edited. That's what he said, precisely. A hundred wounded soldiers on the hospital transport heard it. They were crowding round him. And they told the story when they got ashore. The story varied in trifling details as one would expect among so many witnesses to a tragic event like that. But it didn't vary about what the man said when the Hun commander was swinging his automatic pistol on him.

“There was no opportunity to edit a brave sentence to fit the affair. St. Alban said it. And he didn't think it up as he climbed out of the cabin of the transport. If he had been in a condition to think, he had enough of the devil's business to think about just then; a brave sentence would hardly have concerned him, as I said awhile ago.