CHAPTER X
ART AND SUSPENSE
Nothing had been further from my mind than an Australian exhibition. Icared little for the provincial approbation of the Antipodes, and I washardly ready for Paris--not quite yet. It was only at the reiteratedrequests of friends (two of them were young Australian artists I hadknown in my student days in Paris), to whom I was under real obligationsfor their kindness in receiving and storing my pictures as they dribbledinto Sydney, that I finally gave consent to a public showing. In doingthis, I had stipulated particularly that they were to take all thetroubles and responsibilities of the affair, and that under nocircumstances was I to be expected to appear in person--unless, ofcourse, it suited my convenience and inclination at the time.
As I have said, the affair had been most intelligently handled from thefirst. There had not been enough of my canvases comfortably to fill thewing of the big New South Wales Government Museum and Art Gallery whichwas available for exhibitions, but my friends, rather than pull the showoff at a less pretentious and worse lighted gallery, had added enough oftheir own pictures to relieve the coldness of otherwise blank walls.These were also South Sea marines--it was a straight seascape showthroughout,--but more or less conventional in inspiration and execution.Benchley might have been painting marine backgrounds for an aquarium, sofaithfully did he labour to reproduce every detail of jutting coralbranches and floating seaweed. Crafts, on the other hand, had fallenearly under the influence of Turner, and persisted in bulling the yellowochre market by drenching his Great Barrier Reef seascapes with such aflood of golden light as was never seen save at the head of the Adriaticand now and then on the coasts of Tripoli and Algeria.
I would hardly characterize my own work as a compromise between thesetwo extremes.... It was _not_ that, though I _was_ less of a slave toform than Benchley, and by no means so emancipated from it as Crafts.Rather, I should say, I was striving, independent of either classic orcontemporary influence, to paint such depth, warmth and atmosphere intomy tropical seascapes as would make them convey an _intenser_ suggestionof reality. I did not expect water spaniels to pay me the subtlecompliment of trying to gambol in my breakers, nor children to try tolaunch their toy sailboats in my lagoons.... Benchley's "colourphotograph" effects were more likely to attain to those distinctionsthan my comparatively impressionistic sketches. What I was striving forwas an effect that would compel some such comment as old Jackson hadmade the first time he stood off and conned my "Swells andShells"--"Gawd bly'me, that's _it_! That water's wetter 'n a swept deck,an', s'elp me Mike, but I c'n bloomin' near sniff them bloody clams!"
Very naturally, then, since the sea was what I was painting, theimpressions of anyone who didn't know the sea as intimately as did mybeach-combing cronies of Kai wasn't going to worry me much. The opinionsof men who knew less about the subject of my pictures, and more abouthow pictures in general were painted, didn't strike me as anything thatcounted very seriously. Nevertheless when, at Brisbane on the voyagesouth, I got the Sydney papers with the account of the opening of theshow, it was a good deal of a satisfaction to find that my work appearedto have got over with the art critics. These had, of course (since theywere denied Jackson's facility of expression), to confine themselves tothe jargon of their kind. It was plain, however, that they had beenfavourably impressed, and were doing the best they could with theircomparatively restricted vocabularies. Mere city dwellers, too, most ofthem, one had to allow for their limited capacity of appreciation forsomething--the sea--which they knew only from other pictures. But evenallowing for that, it was reassuring to find that they were comingacross so whole-heartedly. Such capsules of praise as they had in stockwere scattered with lavish hands for whoso would to swallow. "The soulof the sea palpitates through every canvas," said the _Herald_; "youleave the gallery with the tang of blown brine fresh in your nostrils,"said the _Telegraph_; "Australia is honoured with having the firstchance to see this brilliantly distinctive work," said the illustrated_Australasian_, and promised four full pages of reproductions of the"gems of the collection" in its next issue. The young lady (I judged shewas young) who was on the job for the Melbourne _Age_ gushedbreathlessly for a column and a half. This was a sample: "In'Mother-of-Pearl' he has woven with a warp of sunbeams and a woof ofrainbow--a shimmering brocade of exultantly sentient brightness!"Capsules of praise, every one of these; but they were from the top shelfbeyond a doubt, and the fact that they had been reached for indicatedthat at least something of my message had dribbled over the frames.
The _Bulletin_ had done rather better than the others in commissioningfor the occasion an "art critic" who (as transpired in the course of hishalf-page article) had sailed his own sixty-footer to Auckland and back.He, at least, had met the sea on more intimate terms than was possiblethrough Sunday mixed-bathing at Coogee and Manley (with occasionalferryboat passages, about the limit the others had gone, I reckoned).Said he, in speaking of "The Seventh Son of a Seventh Son": "The beat ofthe eternal sea was behind every slash of the brush with which thisFranco-American wizard of light and colour painted that rolling mountainof water. I felt my fingers involuntarily clutching at the spokes of thewheel to bring her up to meet the menace of that curling crest. I forgotwhere I was ... I almost felt the heave of a deck beneath my feet...."
I rather liked that, I must confess; though perhaps it didn't give mequite the double-barrelled thrill of "Heifer" Halligan's comment when Isent for him to pass judgment on that same picture before the paint ofmy finishing touches upon it was dry. A month before, as I have alreadymentioned, I had given the "Heifer" a pretty severe pummelling with thefour-ounce gloves, and, like the good sport he was, to show that therewas no hard feeling on the score of his battered optics, he hadvolunteered to sail me in his sloop to Tuka-tuva (the reef on which Belllost the _Flying Scud_, it may be recalled) so that I could make someclose-range studies of hard-running waves at the point of breaking. And,just to show that there was no hard feeling on _my_ part over the wallopbelow my belt with which the "Heifer" had finally brought the bout to aclose, I accepted. The studies had been made--just a few slashes onoil-cloth with a rather useful waterproof paint I had mixed speciallyfor "sloppy" stunts like that--with my shivering anatomy lashed to the_Wet-Eyed Susy's_ bowsprit, while the "Heifer" tacked back and forthjust beyond the line where the pull of the shoaling reef, dragging attheir bases, let the green-black tops of the combers tumble over in athunderous roar. As he was really taking a good deal of a chance oflosing his handy little pearler, if nothing else, it was only right thatthe "Heifer's" request for a first look-see at the completed pictureshould have the call.
He studied it in silence for a minute or two, legs wide apart and hisbullet head cocked judicially to one side. Then his fine teeth werebared in a broad grin and he vented a throaty chuckle of amusedadmiration. Said he: "Mister Whitney, that hulkin' ol' lalapalooserthere looks like he has all the kick behint him of that bally wallop onthe solar plexus you floored me with the other day." Not even the Sydney_Bulletin's dilletante_ yachtsman could do quite as well as that--frommy standpoint, at least. But of course I had a weakness for the Kaiviewpoint.
The Exhibition had been opened early in the week--the usual affair ofthe kind, "Under the Patronage and in the Presence of His Excellency,the Governor General and Lady X----," and a long list of speciallyinvited guests. Amiable old Lord X---- had made one of the happy littlespeeches for which he was famous. Then they had all had tea and a lookat the pictures. This inevitable formal session out of the way, the showwas opened to the general public. Under the stimulus of theastonishingly enthusiastic press, the public had come through beyond allexpectations. For the next three days the crush at the gallery was, asthe _Bulletin_ had it, like a "bargain day rush at _Morden's_." OnFriday, it was advertised, Sir Joseph Preston, R.A., a verydistinguished English artist visiting in Australia, had consented tospeak at the Exhibition on "The Painter with the New Method and the NewMessage." This was the d
ay of my arrival in Sydney. It did not occur tome at first just who the subject of the discourse was to be. When itfinally came home to me, I began speeding up my transformation processat once. By dint of rushed valeting and dressing, I just managed toreach the gallery as Sir Joseph was getting under way.
I won't endeavour to set down his speech, not even in outline. It washighly complimentary from first to last--and not even condescending,which was as surprising as pleasing when one considered how lofty aneminence Sir Joseph occupied in the art world. One thing I was just abit disappointed about, though, was that the speaker seemed to assumethat the pictures on exhibition represented my ultimate expression, thebest I could do, or could be expected to do; whereas I knew that I hadhardly got my foot well planted on the first rung of the ladder. Iregretted without resenting this. I hadn't painted my hopes andambitions into the pictures, so how was Sir Joseph Preston, more thananybody else, to see what I was driving at? I rather wanted to tell himabout it, though. I hadn't talked with an artist of the old boy'scalibre since I was in Paris, and not often there.
I was just screwing up my nerve to push in and introduce myself, whenBenchley pounced upon me with a joyous whoop and did the thing as amatter of course. Totally oblivious of the widening circle of wonderingcackle that arose as the news of my unexpected, and not undramatic,appearance spread outward through the jam, I held forth to the beamingRoyal Academician on the things that had been passing through my mind.The great man fired as though he had been of tow and my words--myideas--were a torch laid to the inflammable mass of him.
"Magnificent! Perfectly ripping!" he exclaimed with enthusiasm; "butwhat a shame I didn't know that ten minutes ago so that I could havetold them! By Jove, I'll tell them now! Better yet--jolly good idea;_you_ tell them. Just the things you've been telling me."
Benchley, Crafts and my other sponsors descended upon me like a pack ofhounds at those words, and the first thing I knew I had been hustled uponto their little dais, and Sir Joseph was introducing me as "agentleman who can make a few pertinent additions to my late remarks."
I hadn't been called upon for a speech since I won the middle-weightboxing championship of Harvard in my Junior year, and speaking was by nomeans my long suit even in those days. I bucked up and went through itnow though, just as I did on that first occasion. It's no very difficultthing to get away with when you know what you want to say--and have thecrowd with you. I spoke briefly, but very earnestly--very much to thepoint, too, I think. When the crowd had quieted down a bit, tea wasserved. The next morning, when I read the papers in bed, it was todiscover that I had become a fully fledged--or perhaps maned is theproper word--lion.
In one of those same papers there was an interesting item of news aboutanother lion. The special representative the _Herald_ had rushed toTownsville immediately the news of the _Cora Andrews_ affair had beenreceived, wired that the Hon. Hartley Allen, replying from theQuarantine Station to a note the correspondent had addressed him there,announced definitely that it was his intention to pay a visit to his oldhome town of Sydney. He would leave by the first steamer sailing afterthe doctors had certified him free of the danger of plague infection.
That was good news. The best I could have hoped for. It confirmed mygrowing belief that I was not going to have to do much, if any, seekingin order to meet my man. And it was a hundred to one that the doctorwith whom I had talked on the _Utupua_ had told Allen of theconversation as soon as the latter came out of his long sleep, I waseven inclined to the opinion that his decision to go south as soon as hecould had been influenced by a desire to find out once and for all whatattitude I was going to take toward him. This was all to the good. Therewas no need of my hurrying back to Townsville now. I could stay inSydney and enjoy my triumph while watching that of the Hon. HartleyAllen develop. With a lighter heart than I had known since the rumble ofthe _Cora's_ anchor chain awakened me on that day of hateful memory inKai, I tumbled out of bed, took a cold bath, and went down to thedining-room for breakfast--the greatest burst of early matutinal energyI had shown in years.
The avidity of the interest of the public in the Hon. Hartley Allenincreased day by day as the time approached for the hero to come south.All of the important papers had special men on the job in Townsville,and every scrap of news bearing the least relation to the man of thehour was instantly put on the wires and rushed into print. Save for thatone announcement that he intended visiting Sydney, Allen himself gaveout nothing. The correspondents had to confine themselves to reports ofhis continued improvement in health, as passed out to them by thedoctors, and to speculation--columns of it--as to what effect Allen'sreturn might be expected to have upon racing. His elder brother--SirJames, who was now in England--had allowed Hartley's stable to run downa good deal after the latter had been shipped off to the Islands. Therewere a few good horses left after the best of the string had been soldto pay off debts, and these would form a nucleus which could not fail todevelop quickly into a factor to be reckoned with in the meets of nextseason. There was no limit to the discussion of this phase of theaffair, Melbourne and Sydney racing experts devoting even more space toit than the special men in Townsville.
Of the story of the _Cora Andrews_ there was nothing new whatever beingbrought out. If Allen was telling the doctors at the Quarantine Stationanything, it must have been in confidence, for these professed to havelearned nothing further every time the correspondents pressed them fordetails. The schooner herself, it was reported, had broken from hermooring during a gale and been driven upon the beach of Cleveland Bay,some miles from the town. A hole had been stove in her bow and it wouldbe impossible to get her off before considerable repairs were carriedout. As she had not been disinfected since the removal of the plaguevictims, there would probably be some delay about the repairs,especially as the question of her ownership was in doubt. She hadbelonged to the man who sailed her in the labour-recruiting trade, andhe was dead. So was the Skipper who had taken her over in theLouisiades. It looked like the Hon. Hartley Allen had the most validclaim to her, but that was a matter to be adjusted by the courts in anyevent. In the meantime, the schooner, as she was lying in fairly quietwater, was probably safe until the next gale. Thus the papers.
When Allen finally came out of quarantine it transpired that he wouldhave a wait of three days on his hands before there was a steamerdeparting for the south. The delay was unavoidable, although anenthusiastic Sydney paper had suggested that the Admiral commanding theAustralian Naval Station should detach a gunboat to bring the hero home.Allen, it appeared, had actually tried to avoid meeting the newspapermen, and consented to do so finally only on the condition that he wouldnot be expected to give out anything in the way of an interview inrespect to his past, present or future. As they had no alternative inthe matter, the correspondents accepted the ultimatum, but only--as mostof them confessed--in the hope of getting it modified when action wasjoined. They were doomed to disappointment.
Allen received them on the veranda of a house that had been put at hisdisposal by a prominent local shipping man--a detached bungalow in thegrounds of the latter's home on the outskirts of the town. They reportedhim looking rather soft--a good two stone heavier than his former ridingweight. He was heavily browned from the tropical sun, showed a tinge ofyellow--doubtless from malaria and _dengue_,--and his face was deeplylined about the eyes and mouth. He looked to have aged rather more thanthe five years of his absence: but life in the Islands was hardly therest cure most Australians fancied it. No, not by a long shot.
Except for his refusal to tell anything whatever of the story of how hehad brought the plague ship through the Great Barrier Reef, Allen hadbeen very courteous and agreeable to the pressmen. They all agreed thathe was in good fettle--quite full of beans. Indeed, it was Allen who didall of the interviewing. Persistently refusing to answer any questionsabout himself, he was avid of interest concerning all that had happenedin the racing world during his absence. What were the real facts behindthe breakdown of the Colchester filly after she ha
d won the VictoriaNational so handily? Who was that colt _Ballarat Boy_ out of?--the onethat had upset all the dope in the spring meet at Adelaide. Were TodSloan and Skeets Martin still piling up wins in England? What was thesecret of their success? Was there any chance of these or any other ofthe Yank jockeys coming to Australia?
Answering such questions as these for an hour was the way that bunch ofhigh-salaried feature writers interviewed the Hon. Hartley Allen. Andwhen, as one of them put it in somewhat mixed simile, they were "pumpeddry as a last year's dope sheet," the hero announced that the interviewwas over.
Disappointed in their endeavours to pry any pearls from the oysterinto which Allen (for reasons best known to himself) had metamorphosedhimself, the correspondents made the best of a bad job by playing upthe modesty of the man they had been sent a thousand miles or so tointerview. Modest was an adjective that--in the light of what most ofthem knew of Allen's past--it hadn't occurred to any of them to usebefore. Now, however, they made up for lost time. The modest hero didthis, or the modest hero said that.... There was modesty in the way hestroked his chin, in the shrug of his shoulders, in the way he crossedand uncrossed his legs when sitting. His habit of looking sidewayswhen speaking was rated as a sign of modesty; so was the trick ofstroking his cheroot between thumb and forefinger as he smoked._Modest_--_hero_--those words became permanently wedded in my mindduring the week that I was reading leaders written with them for aninspiration, the report of sermons preached with them as a text. Icannot hear the one of them to this day without thinking of the other._Modest hero!_ In the estimation of the public "Slant" Allen, whom I hadalways thought of as the most egotistic man I had ever known, remainedthat to the--until public estimation ceased to interest him.
There was one little item of news telegraphed from Townsville which Iread with a good deal of grim amusement. The day before his departureAllen was given some kind of a send-off in the Town Hall. As he wasriding down the main street on his way to this affair, a man duckedunder the rope holding the crowd back at the curb, rushed at the opencarriage and aimed a blow at the breast of the hero with a knife. Nowhit perturbed, the latter had coolly deflected the thrust by strikingup the assailant's elbow with his left hand. Then, seizing the ruffian'swrist with his right hand, he had brought it sharply down on the edge ofthe carriage door, shattering the bones and causing the knife to fallfrom the relaxed fingers to the pavement. Infuriated by the dastardlyattack, the crowd had set upon the would-be assassin, who was only savedfrom being mauled to death through the interference of none other thanAllen himself.
The correspondents were much impressed, not only by the behaviour of thegenerous-hearted hero in intervening to save the life of the man who hadjust tried to take his own, but also--and especially--by a curiouslittle circumstance in connection therewith. It was observed, in short,that, while Allen had defended his own body most effectually with hisbare hands, as soon as he saw that the man who had attacked him was onthe verge of being killed by a bloody-minded mob, quite beyond policecontrol, he whipped out a revolver and used the menace of it to clear aspace around the trampled body of his late assailant. The correspondentsall thought that was rather fine; indeed, I was inclined to think somyself.
Allen had flatly refused to lodge a complaint against the man who hadtried so desperately to knife him, and even declined to help the policein their attempt to identify the fellow. "Just an old Island affair, thebig-hearted hero had explained with a careless laugh, as he turned onhis way to receive the Golden Key symbolizing the Freedom of the QueenCity of Northern Queensland." That was the way the _Herald_ man had it.
At the Police Station the prisoner was recognized at once as a man namedSaunders, who had been convicted of a series of bullion robberies in theKalgoorlie gold fields of Western Australia some years previously.Because of his diabolical practice of throwing red pepper and vitriol toblind his victims, he had gained the sobriquet of "The Squid." He hadescaped after serving but eighteen months of his twenty-five-yearsentence and made his way across the "Never-Never" to Port Darwin, whereall trace of him was lost for the time. He was supposed to have slippedaway to the Islands. This was confirmed a few months later, when aboatload of out-bound placer miners were held up and robbed of thefruits of their season's work in the Fly gold fields of New Guinea. Evenif one of them, who had once been in Western Australia, had notidentified Saunders, the fact that a jar of sulphuric acid had beenthrown into the midst of the miners would have connected "The Squid"with the crime beyond a doubt. Australia had but fragmentary record ofhis later crimes, but he was known to have been mixed up in a number ofpearl robberies in and about Thursday Island. He had continued topractise his vitriol-throwing trick (varying it occasionally with afiendishly original stunt with some native concoction), and was stillknown as "The Squid." How long he had been lying low in Australia, orwhy he ventured there, he refused to tell; neither would he offer anyexplanation of his savage attack upon the hero of the hour. All he hadsaid in the latter connection was: "'Slant' 'll twig why I took a flyerat returning the pig-sticker to him--it was his onct."
I understood at once that the root of "The Squid's" grudge against Allenstruck back to that affair of the old pearl pirate's missionary-reareddaughter--a copper-haired, ivory-browed Amazon of a girl who had becomeone of the most consummate sirens in the pearleries after a three-monthstrip with "Slant" to Singapore had broken her in. Amazing story thewhole thing, from its beginning with the girl's mother--a teacher in theGospel Propaganda Society's school at Thursday Island who had fallenafoul of one of "The Squid's" tentacles long before his conviction--toits ghastly finish, when the girl herself settled her accumulatedaccount against all mankind with the body and soul of one--a hot-headedlump of a young missionary just out from London.
According to the version current in Kai, Allen had not been greatly toblame in the affair with the temperamental rack of bones and red braidsthat the girl was when she burst upon the Islands from the Aucklandconvent; but "The Squid" evidently felt that the man who had set thesnowball (not a very apt metaphor, for I never heard the girl comparedto anything so frigid) rolling was the one to settle with. I had heardof three or four rather ingeniously thought-out attempts he had made tosquare the account, all of which, however, had failed as a consequenceof Allen's quickness of wit and hand in sudden emergency. The knifefiguring in the Townsville attack, it occurred to me, was probably theone the resourceful "Slant" had put through "The Squid's" shoulder attwenty paces a fraction of a second before the latter had delivered aflask of red pepper from his upraised hand.
I also thought I understood why Allen had bluntly refused to make anyexplanation of the attack. A veritable Turk in his relations with women,that Island Lothario had also the Turk's dislike for discussing hiswomen in public. When sober, Allen rarely if ever boasted aboutanything. When very drunk, he would occasionally toot a horn anent hisracing wins; and once, when he was all but swamped--awash to the railswith "Three Star"--I had heard him give a maudlin monologue on men hehad put away. But I--and no one else, so far as I knew--had ever heardhim talk of the girls he had bagged, though the Lord knows there hadbeen enough of them. (The nearest he ever came to it was in that littlejoke of his I have mentioned--the one about having "a son and a saddlein every island group in the South Pacific,"--and that was only a sortof delicate implication.) His close-mouthedness about women was one of anumber of little things I couldn't help but liking in the rascal.
Since Allen and Saunders would not talk, and since the knife thatfigured in the affair--a heavy dirk, with a shark's hide handle and themark of a Lisbon cutlerer on the blade--could not talk, the ever-baffledTownsville correspondents had been able to gather practically nothingabout what their journalistic noses told them was a red-hot humaninterest story. Blocked on that trail, they devoted a lot of space to adiscussion of the interesting revelation of the hero's Island nickname.More or less ingenious theories as to "Why 'Slant'?" filled the columnsof the papers for a number of days. None of them was within a mile ofthe
mark. One of the correspondents fancied the name had been givenAllen because of his "aquilinity, his wiry slenderness, so that he clovethe air like a slant of sunbeams as he rode." Another writer was surethe name was suggested by the hero's peculiar crouching seat--the slantof his back as he urged on his mount. They were quite incapable of goingbeyond Allen's physical characteristics, or of visualizing him save onhorseback.
That added another little item to the list of things I could haveenlightened the press and the public on about "Slant" Allen, and, inthis particular instance, I wouldn't have minded passing on the facts atonce. Indeed, I made rather a hit at a Government House luncheon one dayby telling how the nearing hero (he was expected to be landing atBrisbane on the morrow) had qualified for his queer nickname. Jackson,who was responsible for the title, had confided to me how he came tobestow it. There was no story behind it, as some of the papers hadhinted. Old "Jack," after having known Allen pretty intimately for acouple of years, came to the conclusion one day that the lankySydney-sider was the first man he ever met who persistently andconsistently kept him guessing. Given a situation, and the foxy oldhighwayman had discovered that he could usually tell in advance how anygiven man would be likely to meet it. It was after he had guessed wrongabout Allen some dozens of times, without once guessing right, thatJackson made up his mind that there was no forecasting the "slant of hiscourse from the slant of the breeze." And because something in themellifluous sound of the word struck pleasantly on the trader's ear, hebegan applying the name to the man who had inspired it. "No re'l reasonfor it," he explained; "but it sure do seem to fit 'im like a new copperbottom does a schooner."
The Governor General's Aide-de-camp, who was something of a follower ofthe ponies, confirmed Jackson's opinion and the fitness of thesobriquet. Said the gaily uniformed "Galloper": "The great secret ofAllen's astonishing success as a point-to-point rider was his amazingfaculty for bringing off the unexpected. Once, at Launceston, I saw himwin on a hundred-to-one shot (how he happened to be riding the skate Idon't know) by deliberately bolting the course and putting his mountfull tilt through a thorn thicket. He was in tenth place, with a mile togo when he did it, and he won the race by a dozen lengths--his own andthe waler's hide in tatters.
"Another unexpected win of Allen's," he continued with the wry grin of aman who speaks of dearly bought experience, "was that 'Totalisator' coupof his at Adelaide. His pals got in on the 'Tote' somehow, and--" Awarning cough from Lord X---- checked the loquacious "Galloper's" tonguein mid-flight, and, with reddening gill, he faded away with: "Sorry,sir, but I forgot it isn't quite--quite the thing to remember thatlittle chapter of Hartley Allen's past. Quite right, really. My mistake.Dead sorry, sir...."
There was no doubt that Allen was going to have a clean-scored slate tobegin writing anew on. I was thinking of that, and "Why 'Slant'?", as Iwalked back to the hotel an hour later. "No forecasting the slant of hiscourse from the slant of the breeze!"... "Faculty for bringing off theunexpected." I hoped that he wasn't going to disappoint me in the matterof bringing things to a showdown on his arrival in Sydney. But no.... Myevery instinct told me that he would not side-step that. So I made allpreparations properly to receive "Slant" Allen, and, on the day of histriumphant home-coming, was waiting for him in my room at the_Australia_, as I have already told.