Читать книгу More Yarns - Lionel Charles Dunsterville - Страница 5

Table of Contents

A year after the War I happened to find myself in Algiers.

The day had been sweltering and I was weary and thirsty as I emerged from an exploration of the native town with its narrow and congested streets into the cooler and purer atmosphere of the Boulevards.

Algiers was distinctly ‘out of season’ and there were none of the gay parties of visitors who enliven the town in the winter months. Still, at this time of day, just after sunset, the cafes were doing good business and I despaired of finding a seat by myself, until at last I caught sight of a small unoccupied table—a two-seater—in a quiet corner of a small restaurant.

Here I sank into a chair and gave my order to the waiter, congratulating myself on my isolation. I had hardly done so, however, when another passer-by, pausing for a moment, spotted my table with one spare chair, and, to my dismay, walked straight up to it.

“May I have this seat if it’s not engaged?” he asked in faultless English.

“Certainly, with pleasure,” I untruthfully replied.

I love my fellow-countrymen and firmly believe that, taking an all-round average, there is nothing to equal them in the world. But I do not go to Algiers to meet Englishmen, I was not in a mood for talking, and the newcomer seemed likely to be expansive.

He was rather a weird-looking individual, and I couldn’t place him at all—very poorly but cleanly dressed in the usual tropical outfit.

A line from one of the lurid books of adventure I had read as a schoolboy flitted through my mind: “his features were bronzed by constant exposure to the powerful rays of a tropical sun.” That description certainly fitted him with accuracy. He was of medium height, with wiry and well-set-up frame of a distinctly military type. His face had probably once been handsome, but a red scar down one cheek and a battered nose had given him a rather demoniac expression, which, however, was a little softened by a pleasing mouth and chin, and a carefully trained fair moustache just turning grey.

But having leisure to examine him more closely during our subsequent conversation, I saw that the most noteworthy feature was his right eye, which had a most remarkable splash of brown in the middle of its steel-blue.

Something in this eye and in his general expression seemed to touch a chord of memory. He reminded me of someone I knew well years ago, probably in subaltern days, but in any case it was someone I had quite forgotten.

His voice, too, seemed faintly reminiscent, but I was not making notes of these things at the time, they only occurred to me later when I was recalling the whole episode.

Although I was far from being in a conversational mood there was something about this strange fellow that rather attracted me, and I soon found myself listening with rapt attention to his rather disjointed sentences.

“Oh, yes. I’ve led a hard life. Women and drink and all that. Foreign Legion. Rather battered as you see. Got another one in the right leg, a bit stiff at times. But I get around all right, and it’s not for much longer, anyway.”

I tried by indirect means to get some idea as to who he was and how he came to be in the Foreign Legion, but he skilfully parried all my efforts in this direction. He had evidently no desire to disclose his identity, on the contrary he seemed very determined to conceal it, so I gave up the attempt.

“Ever been in India?” he asked abruptly.

“Yes. I am in the 20th Punjabis—on a year’s leave,” I replied.

“Good place India. Went out there years ago as a globe-trotter. Had a ripping time; knew a splendid lot of good fellows. Northern India, you know. Punjab and frontier.”

I remembered also many happy episodes of the winter he spoke of, and we were soon plunged into an animated exchange of do-you-remembers.

Suddenly two things struck me.

The first was that this globe-trotter had acquired a wonderful knowledge of men and places and events in a very short time, and the second was that in his reminiscences he was covering a period of several years, which was rather odd for a man who professed to have made only one short visit. I had no time, however, to dwell on this during our breathless and absorbing chat over old times.

“Do you remember a fellow called Shalcombe in one of the Indian Lancer regiments?” he asked.

“Good old Shalcombe. One of my best pals.”

“Is he alive still?”

“Yes, he came through the War all right.”

“Thank God,” he commented.

A peculiar remark. Why this fervent ‘thank God’ for this passing acquaintance of so many years ago.

Much to my regret our conversation was brought to an abrupt conclusion at this point by my friend who, accepting a final apéritif, explained that he was due somewhere in five minutes’ time.

“Well, cheerio, and the best of luck, old boy,” he said as he raised his glass to his lips.

Once more a chord of memory was struck. ‘Old boy’ not usually addressed to a chance acquaintance.

“Look here, you haven’t told me your name yet. Dine with me to-night. I want some more talk over old times, and you interest me enormously.”

“Sorry. Can’t dine. My name you’ll find recorded in the rolls of the Foreign Legion. Carl Hochveld. Here’s my card.”

“By the way,” he added, “before we part, and we are not likely to meet again, I want to ask you to do something for me. You say you’re leaving for home to-morrow. What ship and what time?”

I told him the name of my ship and the hour of sailing, ten o’clock.

“Righto. I’ll see you on board before she sails.” He held out his hand, which I grasped with a sort of feeling that it was not for the first time, and then turned on his heel and was gone.

Next morning, August 12th, having boarded my ship and tucked away my belongings, I took up my position near the gangway hoping that my intriguing friend of yesterday would turn up early enough to give us time for a further interchange of reminiscences and perhaps let fall some clue to his real identity. I was not at all impressed by the name Carl Hochveld, which was obviously self-bestowed to suit the rolls of the Foreign Legion.

I was disappointed, however. No Carl Hochveld appeared, and punctually at 10 a.m. the ship slipped from her moorings and stood out to sea. I went below to arrange my things in my cabin with my mind entirely absorbed with the problem of this fellow’s identity.

The more I thought over things the more I was convinced that he was a man I had known intimately—that peculiar splash of colour in his right eye, who on earth did that recall from the days of long ago?

Why, of course, like a flash of lightning remembrance came to me at last. Charlie Heckfield. Good Lord! Charlie Heckfield.

Fancy my not seeing through the thinly-veiled disguise of Carl Hochveld.

What memories that name called up. Days of sport and horse-racing, nights of drinking and gambling. How many good fellows of those hectic days went to the wall. And Charlie, one of the best of them, swindling his best friends. Most of us had transactions rather near the line, but only Charlie was guilty of that worst of all offences for a soldier, ‘stealing goods the property of a comrade’.

Then I sat and mused over the past. Was it really I: that other fellow I remembered as a gay and reckless subaltern? What days those were. The blood flowed hot in one’s veins and we lived lives that thought not of the morrow. Recalling about thirty names of my boon companions, I could only tick off six as having survived. Jenkins was killed by a bear, Thomson knifed by a Ghazi on the Peshawur railway station, one of the best (no names mentioned) went under with drink, four were killed in frontier expeditions, all these still in the early days; the Great War accounted for most of the rest.

Then I ran over in my mind the sequence of events that had led up to the disappearance from our midst of that good-looking rogue Heckfield. One does occasionally meet men of that type—excellent good fellows with many fine qualities, but quite unable to run straight. Men of good family and good education, but born crooks.

I recalled every step of the tragi-comedy. The whole affair was as clear as crystal in my mind though it all happened thirty years ago and had completely dropped out of my mind, only to be brought to life again by this incredible coincidence of meeting old Heckfield once more in the flesh.

I could have kicked myself for my failure to recognize him. The slash on his cheek and the distortion of that shapely nose were of course a fairly complete disguise, but the sound of his voice was unaltered, his manner of speaking, and that peculiar eye with the odd splash of colour in it, that gave him one of his many nicknames ‘Splosh-eye’, would certainly have revealed him to me if he had only accepted my invitation to dine that night.

I will try to explain now the rather complicated series of frauds perpetrated by Charlie Heckfield just previous to his disappearance from our midst—a detailed record of his many iniquities up to that date which never came to light could obviously only be written by the villain himself. I would reckon that they would run to about six volumes and would make good reading—or bad, according to your point of view.

We were stationed together in the cantonments of an important city, Chandipur, in India. Horse-racing or rather pony-racing was the order of the day, and nearly every subaltern in either British or Indian regiments owned and trained at least one screw that he felt sure was a Derby winner.

Settling day was a hard time for most of us. A few lucky ones were able to appeal to soft-hearted parents, the rest of us went to the Hindu moneylender who gave us what we needed at sixty per cent interest.

Heckfield knew a good deal about horses and often backed a winner. It is possible that he was not the only man on the Indian turf who made a ‘coup’ now and then by ‘arranging’ that the horse he backed should be a winner. It can be done, you know.

But he staked recklessly, and was always head over ears in debt.

In August 1899 he confided to me that he was pretty near the end of his tether—wanted me to back a bill for him, but I had to refuse. I had already been let down once over a similar transaction and wasn’t taking any more risks.

As regards what happened later it is impossible for me to remember exact dates, but it is necessary to have dates as without them it would be hard to follow the tortuous windings of these nefarious transactions, so I must insert approximate ones.

On September 1st I rode home with Heckfield after a very hot game of polo, and he told me that things were looking very black. Debts on every side, money owing to tradesmen and loans from the bazar, no prospect of any help from home. If he sent in his papers that wouldn’t help the matter. Perhaps he’d make a bolt for it and start a new life in some other quarter of the globe.

“I hate letting anyone down,” I remember his saying, “but what the devil can one do if one owes money and has no money and no wealthy father to square the account? I can never pay what I owe, I’d better get out.”

About a week later he met me with a smiling face and without giving me any details told me that ‘something’ had happened and that things were going to be all right.

As a matter of fact things were as wrong as they could be at that moment and he must have already begun to prepare for his flight—his jaunty demeanour was part of the plot, a device to keep the rest of us from being at all suspicious.

Shalcombe of the ——th Bengal Cavalry shared a bungalow with Heckfield, and on going to Kashmir on two months’ leave in July had left one of his ponies in his care, with permission to use her for polo or do anything he liked except race.

Faced with empty pockets and the necessity for immediate flight, Heckfield reluctantly decided to sell his friend’s pony, get away with the proceeds, and I am certain he intended to refund the money almost immediately. That ‘refunding’ always seems so easy to people like that, but it never comes off. Still, to have merely had that intention rather palliates the offence, at any rate to the conscience of the offender.

What Heckfield succeeded in doing was, in brief, that he sold the mare by advertisement, got her full price by auction sale, and collected the money a third time by means of a raffle.

As he is not able to tell his own story I must try and imagine and explain to you with a full knowledge of his affairs how one thing led to another.

He meant originally to ‘raise the wind’ temporarily by selling this horse to a stranger, refunding the money later and getting the horse back to its owner—only a temporary loan, in fact.

From what I knew of his character—and no one knew him more intimately than I—I should say that he never actually intended to do anything dishonest according to his peculiarly elastic conscience. But I admit that his point of view was not quite a normal one. He always had at the back of his mind that vision of some glorious day when tons of money would come from somewhere and he would ‘refund’ everything.

I think that perhaps almost the only sign of foolishness in his clear brain was the absurd fallacy that anyone who ‘was in the know’ could make money (not as a bookmaker) out of betting on horses.

The difficulty in selling his friend’s horse was that it could obviously not be done locally, and an advertisement in the papers would soon be spotted by interested parties. So he wrote to a friend in far-distant Purighat and got him to put up a notice in his club. The price he asked was Rs. 600, at which figure the animal, assuming soundness, was quite a good buy. On September 8th he got a letter from a man named Wilder in the P.W.D. offering to buy the animal if he would send vet.’s certificate. This he had foreseen and was able to do.

He had calculated that Rs. 600 in cash added to other small sums he could raise in various ways would provide him with sufficient funds to pay his way to somewhere out of India and leave him a small sum to start his new life on.

But on the very day that he received this offer of purchase he found himself cornered with regard to an overdue I.O.U. which he was compelled to redeem, a painful transaction that upset all his plans and left him Rs. 1000 short of his needed sum.

Obviously the only thing to do was to get the money out of this fellow Wilder without sending the horse, and then sell it again elsewhere—a plan that needed a good deal of thinking out.

He wrote accordingly a very nice letter to the man in Purighat stating that he was arranging for a horse-box and would despatch the animal on the 12th, but as everything was fair and above-board and he had the vet.’s certificate of soundness, would he kindly send his cheque at once. He was leaving for home on the P. and O. sailing on the 14th and wanted to settle up his accounts before leaving. The good-hearted purchaser complied with this request and forwarded his cheque for Rs. 600.

Heckfield then got two days’ leave on September 10th to the small and not far distant cantonment of Malkabad, where he ran his raffle—to be drawn on September 14th—and raked in Rs. 500.

Then on September 11th he railed the horse to Kalinagar where an auction was advertised for the 12th, and sold it by auction, realizing Rs. 520, and left it in the hands of the new purchaser, a Mr. Sonderby.

He felt grieved at having to leave the nice mare with a stranger and not to have the chance of selling her again, but unfortunately purchasers at auction sales want the goods delivered on the spot, and Florrie was duly handed over.

On returning to Chandipur the same night he was horrified to find a wire waiting for him in which Shalcombe notified him that he was returning on the 14th-15th. Time was getting short, in any case, and risks increasing, and matters beginning to get too complicated even for his astute criminal brain.

On September 13th he got ten days’ leave, and wired the same day to agents in Bombay booking a passage on the outgoing mail steamer on the 14th, and from that time till now there had been no trace of him.

Very soon after his departure the fat was in the fire. Shalcombe returned from leave and people began to ask questions. Heckfield was wired to at an address he had given when proceeding on leave to return at once. No reply being received, the police were called in and very soon partially unravelled the tangled skein of his iniquities. His wire to the agents for passage in the P. and O. gave a good clue, but it turned out to be a useless one as they stated that he never paid for a passage and, unless under a false name, did not sail by that steamer.

The possibility of the false name seemed a fair clue. Telegraphic demands for an inquiry on board on the arrival of the steamer at Aden were complied with, but the officials drew a blank, and in the end it had to be admitted that the villain had disappeared without leaving any trace at all.

What he probably did was to take a tramp steamer to some small port out of India where he could tranship and reach some further destination. It would not have been difficult in those days to make a private arrangement with the skipper of such a ship and get smuggled on board without attracting any attention.

That was the end of Heckfield as far as he was personally concerned, but it was not the end of the business as regards the several victims.

This, then, is how the whole affair culminated.

When Shalcombe returned from leave on September 15th and found that Heckfield had gone on ten days’ leave and taken his pony with him, he was first of all mystified and then suspicious. On September 16th he heard news of his horse having been sold at Kalinagar on the 12th. He went there without delay and had no difficulty in tracing the purchaser, Mr. Sonderby.

Mr. Sonderby was at the railway station seeing his recent purchase into a horse-box when the infuriated owner turned up, and a memorable scene took place which almost ended in a free fight, much to the amusement of the native onlookers.

Sonderby eventually agreed, under protest, to allow Shalcombe to remove his horse, the financial side of the transaction to be made a legal matter later on unless some agreement could be come to.

Wilder then joined in the scramble, writing furious letters from Purighat, and the whole thing was no end of a muddle. In the end I think Shalcombe kept his horse and the other two lost their money.

A knock at my cabin door interrupted my reverie, and my steward handed me a bulky envelope with the purser’s compliments.

I lost no time in tearing open the outer cover, and found that it contained several enclosures and a packet of five and one-pound notes. Firstly, there was this letter to myself:

“Dear Blobbs,

For that is the only name you were ever called by in those good old days that are gone—I’ve had a dullish time for many a long day, but to-day has quite cheered me up.

I am writing this in my dirty little room before I turn in so as to have it ready for you in the morning.

It is about four hours since we sat at that table in the restaurant talking over old times. You silly old ass. Fancy not spotting who I was—even though it is nearly thirty years since we last met, and even though my once Grecian nose has been turned into a retroussé.

Do you think it was by accident that I took a seat at your table to-day? I’ve been looking out for some days for someone—even possibly a stranger—to pass these papers on to, and then suddenly I caught sight of your ugly but pleasing features. I knew you in a moment. No mistaking that unusually high forehead and that peculiar-shaped mouth of yours—hope I don’t hurt your feelings. Obviously sent for me by Providence—the only man who could properly carry out my wishes, knowing all parties concerned.

I’m not going even now to tell you who Carl Hochveld was—the papers I send will make that pretty clear to you.

Please, like a good fellow, do what you can to put things straight for me.

We shall certainly never meet again, and it will be no earthly use your trying any philanthropic stunt—to rescue-the-fallen sort of idea.

I am, as you may have guessed from the look of my clothes, quite down and out. I have struggled for more than a year to collect the little money I am sending you. Don’t shed a tear over it. I do not like sympathy. I did it because it was a pleasure to me, and now I can pass on with clean hands.

I’m a drug-taker, you know. A dirty sort of trick, but I learnt the habit out here and don’t want to get out of it. I know it is beastly, and when I’m without the drug I feel degraded. But when I get my dose—ah, my boy, then I can tell you life’s worth living.

As I have literally not a copper left and no prospects of ever getting any now that I am no longer in the Legion, it will be clear to you that life is not going to be worth living, and I am not going to try and make it so. So that’s that.

Good-bye, old boy. You’ve kept respectable and I haven’t, but you were born lucky. We both lived the same life with the same temptations. At the critical moment your guardian angel just pushed you on to the right track, and as I never had a guardian angel I took the wrong one. But I’ve had some fun out of life, and now that I’ve been able to square this little matter I can drop out quietly without any regrets.”

Among the other enclosures the first was a very crumpled list of ticket-holders in a raffle dated 1889:

“Chestnut country-bred mare ‘Florrie’, 14 hands, 6 years, absolutely sound. Gymkhana winner and handy polo pony. Veterinary certificate of age and soundness.

100 tickets at Rs. 5 each.

Property of C. Heckfield.”

The next was a letter addressed to G. Wilder, formerly of the Public Works Department, India.

“Dear Sir,

Thirty years ago I robbed you of Rs. 600—about £40 in English money.

I’m glad to be able to send it back to you now. Sorry I can’t run to compound interest. It was a mean trick to play and I’m sorry.

Yours truly,

C. Heckfield.”

Then came a letter addressed to:

Hubert Shalcombe,

Once of the Indian Cavalry, now probably Colonel or General.

“Dear Hubs,

Thirty years ago your best pal turned out to be a horse-thief.

He is sorry for doing a dirty trick like that, but we rather lived in that sort of atmosphere, didn’t we? Not that I remember your doing anything mean. I enclose £40, which is about what the mare was worth when I borrowed her. I never knew, by the way, whether you or that fellow Sonderby got the mare in the end. If you managed to get her back from him, this money will be owing to him, of course. It lies between you and him, and a charity. Please accept it, and don’t cut me off your visiting list any more.

Yours ever,

Heckler.”

Attached to the raffle list was a note:

“I scooped Rs. 500 out of this raffle. Worth about £34.

If you can find out the addresses of any who are alive, return the money.

Hand the rest of the money to any charity.

C. Heckfield.”

My first thought after finishing the perusal of the various documents was that my old friend had set me rather a hard task. It would be an easy matter to find out through the India Office if this fellow Wilder were still alive. Shalcombe had been badly wounded at Neuve-Chapelle, had gone on pension, and, like most old soldiers and sailors, was growing roses and cabbages somewhere in the West Country.

But that raffle list was a big order—thirty-five names altogether, a few I could put my finger on, but the majority would be among those who had passed on.

I had been very fond of Charlie Heckfield in the old days—he possessed so many good qualities in spite of his ineradicably ‘crooked’ tendencies, and I was glad that he should have made this really noble—even if rather belated—effort to put things straight.

If he intended going on these lines, I hoped he also intended to come home and take his place once more amongst us as a decent citizen. I felt sure I should be able to rout out some of his people who would help to put him on his legs again. In the meantime I thought the least I could do was to help in giving him this fresh start.

So I wired to the consul in Algiers giving him a description of Heckfield and guaranteeing funds for his immediate necessities, and I followed this up with a letter enclosing one for Heckfield.

On reaching home I found a reply cable waiting for me:

“Carl Hochveld accidentally drowned in harbour here Aug. 12.”