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:

“There you are,” said he, “that’s what you want; she’s in ballast and ready for sea. She’s mine. Buy her, or rent her. She’s a hundred and ten tons and nothing can break her, best sea boat in these waters; she’ll take you to Europe safer than the mails, and I’ll get you a skipper and crew inside the week.”

An hour after I had closed, and the Itang—that was her name—was mine. I’d found a home. A week later I was off, slipping down the Irawadi with the land breeze into the Gulf of Martaban, bound for Europe?—oh Lord, no! I was homesick no longer; Europe might have gone off the map as far as I was concerned, for the Pacific was calling me.

We sailed south down by the Andamans and through the Straits of Malacca, past Java and Flores, into the Banda Sea, tinkered about amongst the islands and then came through Torres Straits; it was May and the south-east monsoon was blowing—you can’t get through that place when the north-west is on, because of the fogs—then steering north by the Louisiades, we passed the Solomons, touched at several of the Carolines and pushed on till we were about half-way between the Ladrones and Wake Island just under 20° North.

That’s where the happening took place.

One blazing hot morning just as I was turning out of my bunk Mallinson, the skipper, came down to report a boat sighted drifting and derelict away ahead on the port bow.

I came up in my pyjamas, and there she was, sure enough, a ship’s boat, with no sign of life and evidently no dead bodies in her, for she was riding high and dancing to the sea like a walnut-shell, but stuck up in the bow of her there was something like a bit of white board fixed to a spar of some sort.

Through the glass Mallinson made out something on the board that he said was writing. I couldn’t; it looked like black lines to me, but he was right.

We closed up with her, dropped a boat, and I put off with Hogg the mate, the Itang keeping to windward on the off-chance of infection. Mallinson had it in his head that the notice on the board might be a warning of smallpox or plague, or something like that, and he’d once been had badly by picking up a plague boat off the Maldives. But it wasn’t.

The notice had nothing to do with disease or infection, and I’ll give you a hundred guesses as to what some old ship master, maybe dying and half crazy with the loss of his ship, and a secret on his conscience had written up for some passing ship to read.

This was it:

“The heir of William Abbott will be found at
11 Churles Street, Shanghai.”

I don’t mind saying that no sailor man has ever struck anything at sea stranger than that. You must remember where we were: a thousand miles of blue ocean all around and that piece of writing staring us in the face; the affairs of William Abbott and his heir, whoever they might be, contrasted with God’s immensities—an advertisement, almost, you might say, written on that desolation.

It struck me clean between the eyes, it was like meeting a man in a top hat in the middle of the Sahara desert. We closed up with the boat; she was clean swept of everything down to the bailer, no ship’s name on her, and worth maybe a hundred dollars; so we towed her to the Itang and got her on board, notice and all.

It was lashed to a boat-hook, which was lashed to the forward thwart, and we cut it loose and brought it down to the cabin, where we hung it up as a trophy.

After the word “Shanghai” there was the indication of a letter that looked like “L,” faint as if the paint had run out or the fellow who was writing had given up the job, dying maybe, before he could finish it; the board itself was an old piece of white enamelled stuff, torn evidently from some part of a ship’s make-up, the whole thing was roughly done, but the chap, whoever he was, had some education, for there was a punctuation mark after the word “Street.”

We stuck it up on the after bulkhead, and there it hung, giving us food for talk every meal time, and on and off for days. Mallinson said it was the work of some chap who had died and left no will, he was a bit of a sea lawyer and he held that if William Abbott was a sailor and it could be proved he was lost at sea and if some relation of his was to be found at 11 Churles Street, Shanghai, the Law, under the circumstance, would regard the thing as a will.

This seemed to me rubbish, but it gave us something to argue about, and so it went on till the thing dropped from our talk as we raised our latitude, looking in at Los Jardines and then steering for Formosa.

I’d determined to have a look at Japan, so we left Formosa, steering north, and then one day, it was off the Riu Kiu islands, the helm went over and we steered for Shanghai.

The fact of the matter was that beastly board had obsessed me. Though we had ceased talking of it, I hadn’t ceased thinking of it. You know the way a problem gets hold of me. Lying in my bunk at night, I worked that riddle backwards and forwards, and up and down. If William Abbott had written it, what had become of him? Why wasn’t his corpse in the boat? What was the use of writing it? As a legal document, it was useless. The whole thing was a tangle, but one fact stood out, it was a message. Well, to whom? Not to the seagulls or the world at large, but to the first person who should pick it up, and the message was:

“The heir of William Abbott lives at such and such an address.” That was quite plain. Also it was evident that the writer meant that the finder of the message should make use of it by bringing it to or sending it to 11 Churles Street.

Whether some man at the address given could benefit by the message or not was another matter—evidently it was in the mind of the writer that he could.

You see how reasoning had brought me to a point where conscience was awakened. I began to say to myself: “It’s your duty to take that message; here you are a well-to-do idler bound for no port in particular, but just following your own pleasure, you are going to Japan for no earthly reason, just for a whim, Shanghai lies almost on your way and your duty is to stop there,” but I didn’t want to go to Shanghai, I had nothing against the place or the Chinese—I just didn’t want to go; however, that didn’t matter, conscience had taken the wheel and I went.

We got to the river before noon one day and picked up a pilot. You don’t know Shanghai? Well, you’re saved the knowledge of the shoals and buoys and lightships and the currents, and the five-mile-long anchorage, to say nothing of the freighters going up and down and the junks out of control. I cursed William Abbott and his heirs before we were berthed, and then, leaving Mallinson in charge, I went ashore to hunt for my man.

I knew Lockhart, the silk man, and found him out, and he made me stop with him at his place all the time I was there, which was only three days.

It’s an interesting place, Shanghai, but the thing that intrigued me most was the fact that there was no Churles Street. Thinking the Johnnie who wrote the notice might have meant Charles Street, I asked for that; there was no such place in the European quarter. The European quarter lies east of the Chinese town. There was no such place in the Chinese town, there was the street of a Thousand Delights and the street of the Seven Dead Dogs, and the street of the Lanterns, and so forth, but they were no use, so, feeling that I was done and shaking the dried mud of Shanghai off my shoes, we put out for Nagasaki.

I sent the notice board flying over the after rail as we dropped the land and dismissed the matter from my mind—from my conscious mind. My subliminal mind had it still in hand, and two days after landing at Nagasaki it asked me this question: “Could that faintly written ‘L’ have been the first letter of the word ‘lost’?”

I went straight to the shipping office and, looking over the list of overdue ships, I found a notice that the steamship Shanghai, bound from London to Canton was eight weeks overdue. You can imagine how the hound in me woke to life and wagged its tail at that discovery. I sat down and wrote out on a sheet of paper the message, amended into this: “The heir of William Abbott lives at 11 Churles Street. Shanghai lost.” If the writer had possessed the time and paint and space he might have given the full strange history of the case and how the boat had been drifted off and about the seas with that message.

Maybe the chap had jumped to the sharks, driven by hunger or thirst as many a man has done, maybe he had painted his message on that bit of board before leaving some slowly sinking ship and taken it in the boat—no knowing, the fact remained, and seemed clear enough, that some desperate urgency of soul had made him, in face of death and with a steady hand, take a paint brush and write that screed on the bare chance of someone picking it up.

You know my make-up and how, having gone so far on an inquiry of this sort, I was bound to go on. It’s different now. I’ll never touch a thing like that again, but that day I stripped for action, determining to see the business through and find out every bit of meaning there was to it.

I started by sending a cable to the Board of Trade, London Docks. Next day at noon I had an answer which read: “Shanghai sixteen hundred tons, Master’s name Richard Abbott.”

That name Abbott coming over the wires all the way from murky London, in answer, you might say, to the name Abbott written on that board away in the blue Pacific, gave me a thrill such as I have never felt before. I knew now the writer of the message, and at the same time I knew that it was not his own money that he was bothering about simply because he wasn’t William Abbott. I knew that it was highly probable that he was a close relation of William Abbott, brother maybe, or son; that might be placed among the high probabilities owing to the similarity of name and intimate knowledge of family affairs. Just so, and I could go a step further; it was pretty certain that Richard Abbott, the master of the Shanghai, was the sole possessor of the knowledge he had given to the world, and, from the urge that drove him in the face of death to tell what he knew, it was possible that the thing weighed on his mind, possible, in fact, that he had kept the thing hidden.

In other words, that he was trying to remedy an injustice committed either by himself or someone else.

I wrote all these probabilities and possibilities down on a sheet of paper, with an account of the finding of the message, sealed the lot up in an envelope and gave it in charge of the manager of the bank I dealt with in Nagasaki, so that in the case of death or accident the heir of William Abbott might have some chance of coming to his due. Then I proceeded to enjoy myself in Japan, determined to think no more of the matter till I got back to London.

I spent a month in Japan, sold the old Itang for more than I had given for her and paid off captain and crew.

I made up my mind that the Churles Street referred to in the message lay in London. London was the home town evidently of the master of the Shanghai, and he would refer to Churles Street—perhaps a well-known place in the dock quarter—just as one might speak of Cromwell Road or Regent Street.

On getting in to Southampton, the first thing I did at the hotel was to consult a Kelly’s directory, and sure enough, there was Churles Street, E.C., the only street of that name, a short street of twenty houses or so with the name J. Robertson against No. 11. The street opened off the West India Dock Road, and two days later, when I had disposed of my private business in London, I took a walk in the East End. The Dock Road is a fascinating place if you are in good health and spirits, and if the day is fine, but there is no fascination about Churles Street, a gloomy, evil looking cul-de-sac, not rowdy, but quiet with the quietude of vice reduced to misery and crouching in a corner.

It was a horrible place.

A thin woman nursing a baby was standing at the door of No. 11. I asked her was anyone of the name of Abbott living there and she glanced me up and down.

“Have you come from his brother?” asked she.

“Yes,” I said, “I’ve come from Captain Richard Abbott.”

She led the way into the passage, opened a door, and showed me into a room where a man, fully dressed, was lying on a bed smoking a pipe and reading a sporting paper.

A typical lounger and ne’er-do-well, unshaved, and with his collar and tie on the chair beside him, this chap gave me pause, I can assure you.

“Well,” he said to the woman, “what’s he want?”

“You’re his brother?” I said.

“Yes,” he replied, “I’m his brother, and who might you be?”

“Met him abroad,” I replied, “and he asked me to call in and see how you were doing.” I was clean cut off from the business I had in mind, some instinct told me to halt right there and show nothing that was in my hand. The man repulsed me.

“Well, you see how I am doing,” replied he, “hasn’t he sent me anything but his kind inquiries?”

“Yes,” I said, “he asked me to give you a sovereign from him.”

I brought out the money and he took it and laid it on the chair by the collar and tie, then he filled his pipe again and we talked. I had taken a chair which the woman had dusted. I talked but I could get nothing much out of him, to ask questions I would have had to explain, and to explain might have meant bringing this unshaven waster on top of me to help him to prosecute his claims. If I did anything further in the matter, I would do it through an agent, but upon my word I felt I had paid any debt I might owe to the master of the Shanghai by the trouble I had taken already and the sovereign I had handed over in his name.

As we talked a pretty little girl of ten or twelve ran into the room; she was dirty and neglected, and as she stood at the end of the bed with her great eyes fixed on me, I could have kicked the loafer lying there, his pipe in his mouth and his sporting paper by his side.

It seemed that he had four children altogether, and as I took my leave and the woman showed me out, I put another sovereign into her hand for the children.

There I was in the West India Dock Road again feeling that I could have kicked myself. It was not so much the trouble I had taken over the business that worried me as the wind up. I’d put into Shanghai, sent cables from Japan, altered my plans, spent no end of money to bring news to that rotten chap, news of a fortune that if secured would certainly be burst on racing and drink.

I said to myself that this came of mixing in other folks’ business and I took an oath never to do it again—I didn’t know I was only at the beginning of things.

Murchison was the agent I determined to employ to finish up the affair. Murchison is less a detective than an inquiry agent, his game is to find out facts relative to people, he lives in Old Serjeants’ Inn, and knowing him to be secrecy itself and not caring to employ my lawyer, I determined to go to him next day and place the matter in his hands, telling him to do what he could with the business, but to keep my name out of it. He need mention nothing about the finding of the message, but he could give it as coming from some unknown source—the message was the main thing, anyhow.

I called at his office next morning. Murchison is a thin old chap, dry as a stick. I told him the whole story and it made no more impression on him than if I’d been telling it to a pump. He made a note or two, and when I had finished, he told me in effect that he wasn’t a District Messenger, but an inquiry agent, and that I had better take the thing to my lawyer. He seemed put out; I had evidently raised his tracking instincts by my story and ended simply by asking him to take a message.

I apologised, told him the truth, that my lawyer was an old-fashioned family solicitor, gone in years, touchy as Lucifer, the last man in London to set hinting of possible fortunes to beggars in slums. “If you won’t do it yourself,” I finished, “tell me of a man who will.”

“I can tell you of plenty,” he replied, “but if you take my advice you will let me make an inquiry into the business before you move further in the matter; there’s more in it than meets the eye and you may be doing injury to other parties by stirring up the mud, for this man you tell me of seems mud.”

“A jolly good name for him,” said I. “Well, go ahead and make your inquiries; it’s only a few pounds more thrown after the rest, and it will be interesting to hear the result.” Then I left him.

A month later I got a letter asking me to call upon him, and I went.

When I took my seat he sent the clerk for the Abbott documents, and the clerk brought a sheaf of all sorts of papers, laid them on the table and went out. Murchison put on his glasses, took a glance through the papers and started his yarn.

Beautifully concise it was, and I’ll give you it almost in his own words.

William Abbott, of Sydney, N.S.W., was a wool broker who came to England in the year 1906 and died worth some hundred and fifty thousand pounds. He had three sons, John, Alexander and Richard.

The Will was simple and direct. Murchison laid a copy of it before me, taken by permission of Abbott’s lawyer’s, whom he had found, and it ran something like this.

“Owing to the conduct of my eldest son, John Abbott, I hereby revoke my Will of June 7th, 1902, by which I bequeathed him the whole of my property, with the exception of the sum of twenty thousand pounds to be equally divided between my sons Alexander and Richard. I hereby bequeath the whole of my property to my son Alexander Abbott. Signed: William Abbott, July 10th, 1904. Witnesses: John Brooke, Jane Summers.”

“Well,” said Murchison, as I handed the paper back, “that signature is a forgery; the body of the document is written as if by a clerk in almost print character, but though I have never seen the handwriting of William Abbott, I will bet my reputation that the signature is forged.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“Because the signatures of the witnesses are forged; they have both been written by the same hand. The signature ‘William Abbott’ has evidently been carefully copied from an original, there is a constraint about it that tells me that, but the witnesses’ signatures, where the forger had nothing to copy and had to invent imaginary names, simply shout. The fool never thought of that; leaving the point of similarity aside, the woman’s signature is as masculine as a Grenadier. The body of the document, though almost in print, is also the work of the forger.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” said he, “handwriting with me is not only a science which I have studied for fifty years; it is something that has developed in me an instinct. Now to go on. Alexander Abbott lives in a big house down in Kent. Richard, at the time of his father’s death, was a captain in the Black Bird Line, evidently working for his bread. A year after his father’s death he bought the steamer Shanghai, paying a large sum for it spot cash. He was an unmarried man, and when ashore occupied a flat in Bayswater. Alexander is a widower with one daughter.—That’s all. The case is complete.”

“How do you read it?” I asked. The old chap fetched a snuff box out of a drawer in the desk, took a pinch and put the box back without offering it.

“I read it,” he said, “in this way. John, the eldest son, was a bad lot; the father may have intended to disinherit him, and make a second will; anyhow, he didn’t; put it off as men do. When the father died, Alexander boldly did the trick. Richard may have been party to the business, at first—who knows? Anyhow, it seems that he was later on, since he was able to plank that big sum down for the ship, and since he was left nothing in the will, and since, as you say, he put up that notice you took off the boat and which told the truth.”

I said nothing for a while, thinking this thing over. I was sure Murchison was right.

This thing would have been weighing in the sailor’s mind for years; from what I could make out at Churles Street he had evidently been making John some sort of allowance; one could fancy the long watches of the night, the pacing of the deck under the stars, and the mind of the sailor always teased by the fact that he was party to this business, a forgery that had kept a brother, however bad, out of his inheritance. Then the last frantic attempt to put things right in the face of death, the agonised thought that to write the thing on paper was useless, paper that would be washed away by the rain or blown away by the wind.

“Well,” said I to Murchison, “it seems plain enough, and now, on the face of it, what would you advise me to do?”

“If I were in your place,” said he, “I would do nothing. You say this elder brother is a scamp; Alexander, on the other hand, is a rogue; if you mix yourself up in the business you may have trouble. Why should you worry yourself about a bad lot of strangers?—turn it down.”

That seemed sensible enough, but you see Murchison knew only the bare facts of the case; he had not seen that notice board tossing about in the desolation of the Pacific.

I left him without having made up my mind as to what I should do, half determined to do nothing.

The bother was that the facts Murchison had put before me gave a new complexion to the whole business, a new urgency to that message which I had not delivered. I felt as if the captain of the Shanghai had suddenly come to my elbow, him and his uneasy conscience craving to be put at rest. Just so, but on the other hand there was John Abbott, and I can’t tell you the grue that chap had given me. It wasn’t that he was a boozer, or a waster; he was bad; bad right through and rotten. There is a sixth sense, it has to do with morals and the difference between good and evil; it told me this chap was evil, and the thought of helping to hand him a fortune made my soul revolt.

Still, there you are, I didn’t make the chap, and the fact remained that in doing nothing I was holding him out of his rights.

All that evening the thing worried me and most of that night. Next morning I couldn’t stand it any longer. I took the train for Oakslot in Kent. I had determined to go straight to Alexander Abbott, beard him, tell him of the notice I had found and see what he had to say. The idea came to me that he might make restitution in some way without handing all the fortune over to John—anyhow, it would be doing something, and I determined to use all my knowledge and power if necessary.

Ever been to Oakslot? It is the quaintest and quietest place, and it wasn’t till I got out of the train and found myself on the platform that the terrible nature of the business I was on took me by the arm.

I had no difficulty in finding Alexander Abbott’s residence; the Waterings was the name it went by, an old Georgian house set in a small park; one of those small, rook-haunted, sleepy, sunlit pleasaunces found only in England and best in Sussex or Kent.

I was shown into the drawing-room by an old manservant, who took my card, on which I had pencilled: “From Captain Richard Abbott.”

A few moments passed and the door opened and a girl came in, a girl of sixteen or so, pretty as a picture and charming as a rose; one of those sweet, whole, fresh, candid creatures, almost sexless as yet, but made to love and be loved.

I stood before her. I was Tragedy, but she only saw a man. She told me her father was unwell but would see me. Would I follow her?

She led me to a library, and there, seated by the window which gave upon the sunlit park, sat the criminal, a man of forty or so, a man with seemingly a good and kindly face, a man I would have trusted on sight. He was evidently far gone in consumption, this forger of documents, and it was pretty evident that anxiety had helped in the business; a weight on the conscience is a big handicap if one is trying to fight disease.

I sat down near him and started right in; the quicker you get a surgical operation over the better, and so he seemed to think, for when I told him of the finding of the notice and went on to say that it might be necessary to inquire into the will and that I had reason to believe there was something wrong about it, he saw I knew nearly everything and stopped me right off.

“Everything is wrong about it,” said he, “and thank God that this matter has fallen into the hands of a straight and honest man like you—you will understand. This thing has tormented me for years, but when you have heard what I have to say you will know I did wrong only to do right. There is no greater scoundrel in this world than my brother John Abbott; a terrible thing to say but the truth. My father had made a will leaving him everything. He placed that will in the hands of James Anderson of Sydney, our lawyer. Anderson knew John’s character better than my father and was averse from the business, but he could do nothing. My father was a very headstrong man and blind to John’s doings, which the scamp somehow managed to partly conceal from him. He thought John was sowing his wild oats and that he would be all the better for it. John could do no wrong in his eyes, but a few days before his death he had a terrible awakening with a forged bill of exchange—forgery seems to run in the family. It cost him five thousand pounds to stifle the matter, and the day after the business was settled my father died; slipped coming downstairs, fell, and broke his back.

“I was there and he died in my arms, and his last words were: ‘Get that will from Anderson and destroy it.’ He had no power to write a new will, no strength even to write his signature, and when he was dead there was I with those words ringing in my ears.

“I knew my father intended to revoke his first will, would have done it that day; maybe, ought to have done it days ago, but his mind was in a turmoil and he was a strong, hearty man with never a thought of death. Well, there I was, not only with that knowledge but the knowledge that if the property fell to John it would be the end of the family’s good name; that beast was only possible when he was kept short of money—then there was the lower consideration of my own position, penniless and at John’s mercy.

“I made a will and put my father’s name to it, sure that Anderson would make no trouble, sure that John would not inquire into it, for the forgery of the bill of exchange had drawn his teeth, and the fact of that forgery would account to him for the change in the disposition of the property.

“I dated the will, it is true, some years back, and in the time my father lived in Sydney. I did that because I had to forge the names of the two witnesses; had I dated it recently someone might ask who are these witnesses? As it was there was no one to put that question to, for I was not in Sydney at the time indicated in the will—they might have been hotel servants—anyone.

“I left myself the whole property, not from greed but simply because my brother Richard was at sea. I knew his temperament and character, and it was possible that, had I made him part heir, he would have revolted and disclosed all—for I had determined to tell him everything.

“I placed the forged will among my father’s papers; it was proved and there was no trouble. Anderson, whose clients are largely wool brokers and Australian merchants, has a branch office in London; they were my father’s solicitors in England as well as Australia, and the whole thing went through their hands. They had all the less reason to cast any suspicious eye on the document in as much as they had dealt with the forgery of the bill of exchange.

“Then Richard came back from sea and I told him all. He was horrified, yet he saw that what I had done had been simply to carry out my father’s wish. It was impossible to destroy the old will as he had directed, or possible only in one way—by the creation of a new will.

“After a while he cooled on the matter and even accepted a large sum for the purchase of a ship, the Shanghai, now lost. But the thing weighed on his mind as it has on mine, only more so. He was of a different temperament. He did not dread detection, with him it was entirely a matter of conscience: he felt he had defrauded John by being partner to the business, and accepting that sum of money. He seemed to think in his sailor way it would bring him bad luck; no doubt when the end came and he lost his ship he had that in mind, and lest the bad luck might follow him into the next world wrote that notice you found. I have only a few more months to live—now tell me, was I right or wrong in doing what I did?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I am not your judge, but all I can say is this: from what I know of the business, I will move no further in the matter, if for no other reason than that, should John Abbott get word of the business, your daughter would be rendered penniless after your death.”

“Absolutely,” said he.

I asked him was John receiving an allowance, and he said yes. He was receiving two pounds a week for life.

Then I left him and took the train for London, and from that day to this I have heard nothing of any of the lot of them. I expect he’s dead and his daughter an heiress—I don’t know, but I’ll never touch a thing like that again. Even still I’m bothered to know if I was right or wrong in holding my hand and tongue. What would you have done in similar circumstances?