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Epilogue: To Will H. Low
DEAR LOW: The other day (at Manihiki of all places) I had
the pleasure to meet Dodd. We sat some two hours in the neat,
little, toy-like church, set with pews after the manner of Europe,
and inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the style (I suppose) of the
New Jerusalem. The natives, who are decidedly the most
attractive inhabitants of this planet, crowded round us in the
pew, and fawned upon and patted us; and here it was I put my
questions, and Dodd answered me.
I first carried him back to the night in Barbizon when Carthew
told his story, and asked him what was done about Bellairs. It
seemed he had put the matter to his friend at once, and that
Carthew took it with an inimitable lightness. "He's poor, and
I'm rich," he had said. "I can afford to smile at him. I go
somewhere else, that's all--somewhere that's far away and dear
to get to. Persia would be found to answer, I fancy. No end of
a place, Persia. Why not come with me?" And they had left
the next afternoon for Constantinople, on their way to Teheran.
Of the shyster, it is only known (by a newspaper paragraph)
that he returned somehow to San Francisco and died in the
hospital.
"Now there's another point," said I. "There you are off to Persia
with a millionaire, and rich yourself. How come you here in
the South Seas, running a trader?"
He said, with a smile, that I had not yet heard of Jim's last
bankruptcy. "I was about cleaned out once more," he said;
"and then it was that Carthew had this schooner built, and put
me in as supercargo. It's his yacht and it's my trader; and as
nearly all the expenses go to the yacht, I do pretty well. As for
Jim, he's right again: one of the best businesses, they say, in
the West, fruit, cereals, and real estate; and he has a Tartar of a
partner now--Nares, no less. Nares will keep him straight,
Nares has a big head. They have their country-places next door
at Saucelito, and I stayed with them time about, the last time I
was on the coast. Jim had a paper of his own--I think he has a
notion of being senator one of these days--and he wanted me to
throw up the schooner and come and write his editorials. He
holds strong views on the State Constitution, and so does
Mamie."
"And what became of the other three Currency Lasses after they
left Carthew?" I inquired.
"Well, it seems they had a huge spree in the city of Mexico,"
said Dodd; "and then Hadden and the Irishman took a turn at
the gold fields in Venezuela, and Wicks went on alone to
Valparaiso. There's a Kirkup in the Chilean navy to this day, I
saw the name in the papers about the Balmaceda war. Hadden
soon wearied of the mines, and I met him the other day in
Sydney. The last news he had from Venezuela, Mac had been
knocked over in an attack on the gold train. So there's only the
three of them left, for Amalu scarcely counts. He lives on his
own land in Maui, at the side of Hale-a-ka-la, where he keeps
Goddedaal's canary; and they say he sticks to his dollars, which
is a wonder in a Kanaka. He had a considerable pile to start
with, for not only Hemstead's share but Carthew's was divided
equally among the other four--Mac being counted."
"What did that make for him altogether?" I could not help
asking, for I had been diverted by the number of calculations in
his narrative.
"One hundred and twenty-eight pounds nineteen shillings and
eleven pence halfpenny," he replied with composure. "That's
leaving out what little he won at Van John. It's something for a
Kanaka, you know."
And about that time we were at last obliged to yield to the
solicitations of our native admirers, and go to the pastor's house
to drink green cocoanuts. The ship I was in was sailing the
same night, for Dodd had been beforehand and got all the shell
in the island; and though he pressed me to desert and return
with him to Auckland (whither he was now bound to pick up
Carthew) I was firm in my refusal.
The truth is, since I have been mixed up with Havens and Dodd
in the design to publish the latter's narrative, I seem to feel no
want for Carthew's society. Of course I am wholly modern in
sentiment, and think nothing more noble than to publish
people's private affairs at so much a line. They like it, and if
they don't, they ought to. But a still small voice keeps telling
me they will not like it always, and perhaps not always stand it.
Memory besides supplies me with the face of a pressman (in
the sacred phrase) who proved altogether too modern for one of
his neighbours, and
Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum
as it were, marshalling us our way. I am in no haste to
--nos proecedens--
be that man's successor. Carthew has a record as "a clane
shot," and for some years Samoa will be good enough for me.
We agreed to separate, accordingly; but he took me on board in
his own boat with the hard-wood fittings, and entertained me
on the way with an account of his late visit to Butaritari,
whither he had gone on an errand for Carthew, to see how
Topelius was getting along, and, if necessary, to give him a
helping hand. But Topelius was in great force, and had
patronised and-- well --out-manoeuvred him.
"Carthew will be pleased," said Dodd; "for there's no doubt
they oppressed the man abominably when they were in the
Currency Lass. It's diamond cut diamond now."
This, I think, was the most of the news I got from my friend
Loudon; and I hope I was well inspired, and have put all the
questions to which you would be curious to hear an answer.
But there is one more that I daresay you are burning to put to
myself; and that is, what your own name is doing in this place,
cropping up (as it were uncalled-for) on the stern of our poor
ship? If you were not born in Arcadia, you linger in fancy on
its margin; your thoughts are busied with the flutes of antiquity,
with daffodils, and the classic poplar, and the footsteps of the
nymphs, and the elegant and moving aridity of ancient art.
Why dedicate to you a tale of a caste so modern;--full of details
of our barbaric manners and unstable morals;--full of the need
and the lust of money, so that there is scarce a page in which
the dollars do not jingle;--full of the unrest and movement of
our century, so that the reader is hurried from place to place
and sea to sea, and the book is less a romance than a
panorama--in the end, as blood-bespattered as an epic?
Well, you are a man interested in all problems of art, even the
most vulgar; and it may amuse you to hear the genesis and
growth of _The Wrecker_. On board the schooner Equator,
almost within sight of the Johnstone Islands (if anybody knows
where these are) and on a moonlit night when it was a joy to be
alive, the authors were amused with several stories of the sale
of wrecks. The subject tempted them; and they sat apart in the
alley-way to discuss its possibilities. "What a tangle it would
make," suggested one, "if the wrong crew were aboard. But
how to get the wrong crew there?"--"I have it!" cried the other;
"the so-and-so affair!" For not so many months before, and not
so many hundred miles from where we were then sailing, a
proposition almost tantamount to that of Captain Trent had
been made by a British skipper to some British castaways.
Before we turned in, the scaffolding of the tale had been put
together. But the question of treatment was as usual more
obscure. We had long been at once attracted and repelled by
that very modern form of the police novel or mystery story,
which consists in beginning your yarn anywhere but at the
beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the end; attracted
by its peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar difficulties
that attend its execution; repelled by that appearance of
insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable
drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up
clews, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an
airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains
enthralling, but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work
of human art. It seemed the cause might lie partly in the abrupt
attack; and that if the tale were gradually approached, some of
the characters introduced (as it were) beforehand, and the book
started in the tone of a novel of manners and experience briefly
treated, this defect might be lessened and our mystery seem to
inhere in life. The tone of the age, its movement, the mingling
of races and classes in the dollar hunt, the fiery and not quite
unromantic struggle for existence with its changing trades and
scenery, and two types in particular, that of the American
handy-man of business and that of the Yankee merchant sailor
--we agreed to dwell upon at some length, and make the woof
to our not very precious warp. Hence Dodd's father, and
Pinkerton, and Nares, and the Dromedary picnics, and the
railway work in New South Wales--the last an unsolicited
testimonial from the powers that be, for the tale was half
written before I saw Carthew's squad toil in the rainy cutting at
South Clifton, or heard from the engineer of his "young swell."
After we had invented at some expense of time this method of
approaching and fortifying our police novel, it occurred to us it
had been invented previously by some one else, and was in
fact--however painfully different the results may seem--the
method of Charles Dickens in his later work.
I see you staring. Here, you will say, is a prodigious quantity
of theory to our halfpenny worth of police novel; and withal not
a shadow of an answer to your question.
Well, some of us like theory. After so long a piece of practice,
these may be indulged for a few pages. And the answer is at
hand. It was plainly desirable, from every point of view of
convenience and contrast, that our hero and narrator should
partly stand aside from those with whom he mingles, and be
but a pressed-man in the dollar hunt. Thus it was that Loudon
Dodd became a student of the plastic arts, and that our globe-
trotting story came to visit Paris and look in at Barbizon. And
thus it is, dear Low, that your name appears in the address of
this epilogue.
For sure, if any person can here appreciate and read between
the lines, it must be you--and one other, our friend. All the
dominos will be transparent to your better knowledge; the
statuary contract will be to you a piece of ancient history; and
you will not have now heard for the first time of the dangers of
Roussillon. Dead leaves from the Bas Breau, echoes from
Lavenue's and the Rue Racine, memories of a common past, let
these be your bookmarkers as you read. And if you care for
naught else in the story, be a little pleased to breathe once more
for a moment the airs of our youth.
-THE END-
Robert Louis Stevenson's novel: The Wrecker]
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