“That woman stayed on in Noumea, and I made her love me at last. I married her, you know her, she is my wife. She loves Armand still, as a memory, and for the sake of his memory we live here. It’s as good a place to live in as anywhere else, especially now that they have settled to send no more convicts from France.”
A man may live all his days without finding his true vocation, and it is often accident that reveals it to him. Herschel might have ended his days a music master only for chance, and Du Maurier towards the finish of his life found that he had been all his life a novelist without knowing it.
Some years ago my friend John Sargenson found on the beach near Dover an old red satin shoe that had been washed ashore tied to a bundle of papers. I have told the story elsewhere and how, brooding over these things, and by powers of analysis and synthesis rarely linked in one brain, he solved the riddle and brought a murderer to justice.
He didn’t continue in the business. He is a very rich man, and God’s beautiful world offers him better objects of pursuit than the crook and criminal; all the same, a year after the shoe business, accident brought him again in touch with a problem. He took the thing up, followed it to its solution and now he wishes he hadn’t. This is the story as he told me it.
I don’t know what it is about travelling that palls on one so much if one is travelling alone, maybe it’s the fact that the perfectly friendly people one meets are dead strangers to one, for all their conversation and close propinquity; a sea and land journey round the world is, in this respect, nothing more than a magnified bus ride, passengers getting in and out, talking together and so forth, but dead to one another once the destination is reached.
It was at Rangoon that this great fact hit me, and incidentally laid the keel of the yarn I promised to tell you. I was suddenly fed up with boats, trains, hotels and strangers, homesick down to the heels of my boots, and wanting some place of my own to hide in; anything, even a shack in the jungle. It was the queerest feeling, and one day when it was gripping me hard, I fell in talk in the hotel bar with an old saltwater chap by name of Boston, who owned boats on the Irawadi and a couple of deep-sea schooners. I told him what was in my mind and he understood. He took me by the arm and led me off down to the river, and pointing out a schooner tied up to the wharf: