Chapter XXVIII: On the Scent

Clank and fury and scream; by day and by night; squibbing like a fallen unspent comet the length of France, and leaving a shining trail as we go; by flat grey pastures, hardly billowing, and little churches with unfamiliar belfries, and rows of plumelike poplars, that pass and come again and flicker and dazzle like tall palings endlessly repeated; swooping at a perilous poise round the wine-shop ends of hamlets seemingly strayed and stranded in the fields, or grazing slow-crawling carts of a strange build, driven by stranger waggoners, as if the railway track were but a track after all, which we are wont to lose, and take up, and lose again; rushing, shrieking, upon little blue-smocked men, or, as often, women, who stand waving absurd flags at level-crossings, and only missing them, it appears, by the breadth of a wind-shaving; on again with a yell of baffled fury; ripping, periodically, if we may judge by the sound, a passage through match-wood stations, which fly into splinters about us, and disregarding all warning signals of long white arms flung up--so through a land, infinitely strange and wonderful to me, we go roaring southwards to our destiny.

A wild new experience to a woodland hermit--marvellous by day; weird beyond expression in the rushing dark. What islander, self-contained in his little sphere, might have guessed the wizard potency of that slender streak of water called the Channel? One takes it at a gulp, and, lo! there is a world about one continents removed, it seems, from the life of one’s knowledge. A seventy times seven leagued boot is the little steamer into which one puts one’s foot, to reach at a step from Dover to Calais. It is a longer stride by all the world than from Dan to Beersheba. The red trousers of the soldiers on the pier strike the first colour note of dissonance. They have walked with Napoleon in Egypt. The blood mystery of the Sphinx is in their hue.

And when night at last veils the scene from one’s aching eyes, and the shrieks, the eternal shrieks, are uttered in darkness, urging one on to what potential awakening in livid dawns--then is the time for dreams such as one has never dreamt before. When the throb of the engine claims one’s pulses to its beat, and its breath paints one with a sooty rime, and one feels oneself being slowly absorbed into the system of that crashing, hurtling monster--a small integral part of its mechanism--what hope seems left at last of any detachment from the chimera to which one has committed one’s destinies!

Such spaces may be covered in those long night hours. I had never realised the like before--had never been sped so far, by hundreds of miles, against my own will of volition. My helplessness affected me like a personal humiliation. We would catch up tempests, and tunnel a mad course through them, and leave them battling and booming in our rear. In ragged spaces of the clouds the moon would shine out, tossing like a lightship on tumultuous waters, and disappear, and be another beacon on another shoal when seen again. The shadow of a world rushed by our windows, phantom fabrics caught in starry glimpses, and always seeming stranger as we fled. But I slept at last, and was whirled a passionless straw upon the tide.

Very strange, in truth, was all this long journey to me. Yet it was taken in fullest possession of the antidote to its worst penalties. Johnny symbolised that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. I had already suspected the fact; now I was convinced of it. The subtle aroma of his godhead had flown abroad, and our way thenceforth was to be clouded with the incense of mammon-worship. It was not enough that his purse had secured us every luxury meet to the amelioration of our hard lot; obsequious officials, in a democratic land, clamoured for the privilege of making our primrose path primrosier and the down of our cushions downier. They were so downy themselves, that if they had plucked their breasts like swans for our nesting, we should have been suffocated long before they were denuded. However, the attention brought its advantages to all but poor Johnny himself, whose way was made rocks and briars to him.

On and on unceasing tears the mad comet, until striking, after æons of flight, it seems, a mountain rampart, with a mighty crash and scatteration of sparks it goes to earth, and is quenched and buried from the eyes of the world in the Mont Cenis tunnel.

They advise you to keep the windows shut, as you go cork-screwing up that infernal staircase. You might find it worse if you did not; it is bad enough when you do. Drifts of asphyxiating smoke, fitfully lambent, stream by the glass, and writh about and nozzle where they fancy they have detected an opening. It may not be large enough for them to enter by, but whiffs of their poisonous breath leak in, and give you a taste of what you might expect were they to find you napping. The train itself, in that choking atmosphere, seems to go weak at the wheels, and to drag itself wearily upward, as if every revolution must be its last, committing you in prospect to the alternatives of entombment in the heart of a mountain or a back-descent at rocket-speed into France. A throb as of thunderous subterranean waters fills your ears; the wind of your passage clacks like a monstrous tongue on the stony roof above you; it seems impossible that any work of man can withstand the hugeness of that deafening uproar and vibration. But it is all, of course, acoustically exaggerated to you in your confined pen. You are going up a spiral chimney, with a sufficient ventilation at the top. The clamour of your rising emerges there with the smoke and steam, and, like a piston rod, you expel them before you as you advance. And so, at last, when you have almost given up hope, a flash--and Elysium.

I think the world can give one no first experience at once so sombre and so dazzlingly impressive as that of the passage of the Col de Fréjus, with its entry from low France and emergence into high Italy. Thirty minutes are but half-an-hour out in the daylight; in the Mont Cenis tunnel they amount to a good long spell of purgatory. There the wails of the damned go past in drifts of lurid smoke, most agitating in their bearing on the fragile pane which alone separates the eternal from the temporal classes. One finds oneself hoping that the ministers of justice have fully understood their instructions about one, and that one will be permitted to reach redemption without the window being broken. Curiously, too, the system of bought indulgence strikes one for the first time as having something in it. The cost would be very small to shorten this tunnel by a spiritual mile or two.

And yet, when it is ended, one would not have had it shorter by a metre, because every foot taken from it would mean just so much ecstasy filched from one’s awakening from a nightmare. For, behold! from travelling in a steaming suffocating drain pipe, one is spat out suddenly into Paradise in winter.

After that, it seems bathos to compare the prospect with a transformation scene at a pantomime; yet, I think, perhaps, the latter analogy is the apter. The instant glide from terrific night into fairyland; the stupendous brown gullies, dripping icicles from a sabre’s length to a maypole’s; snow in fields, on slopes, in ravines, all of a blinding lustre, and stained in its shadows of a celestial blue; a world of high-lifted iridescence, streaked with gold leaf, spangled with glass dust, discharging ice-crusted torrents under archways of glittering rock, climbing peak over peak to the heaven-painted “cloth” of light, living and violet, which makes its background--that is how the vision of Italy first broke upon me, emerging from the portal of the underworld.

But, as to Geoletti, the man was translated like Bottom the weaver. If, to me, the world had suddenly sprung into a vision of “cloud-capped towers” and glittering pinnacles chiming unearthly music from diamond bells, to him it was as the thronging of old familiar spirits gathered to greet his return. He gazed and gazed, and danced on his seat, and uttered uncouth ejaculations. He hugged himself in spasms, and bit his nails, and glared with burning eyes that the rising waters of his soul could hardly quench. Have you ever seen the wild spirit of the sea wake in a captive gull when the wind came on to blow? So wrought the spirit of his mountains on Geoletti. I think there was not one of us whose soul did not respond in some measure to the tragic pathos of that revelation. For what trifling messes of pottage cannot the fool in us be induced to part with his inheritance!

But enough of all this. My theme is Cain, not Esau; murder, not mountains. The comet, slackening now in its descent, bears us down by beautiful winding valleys to the plains of Piedmont, and spent and slow at length, discharges us upon Turin and Signor Valombroso.

That was his magnificent name, no less. He was not only the first of Piedmontese detectives, but an accomplished linguist to boot, and had been engaged from London, regardless of expense, to the service of Milord Johnny di Dando. He took us all under his wing at once, Inspector Jannaway even condescendingly, and shepherded the flock of us with a masterful volubility.

He was a tiny slim-waisted man, but his chest was stupendous. He might have packed all the rest of himself into it, and still have found room for a superior conceit or two. It stood for Valombroso in Valombroso’s own opinion. The frill, or comb, which strutted from it, through the unbuttoned upper half of its owner’s neat frock coat, proclaimed him cock of the walk in his own exclusive department. In further emphasis of Valombroso’s supremacy, Valombroso’s silk hat was put at an angle on his head like an acute accent on Valombroso, and Valombroso’s moustachios, waxed into stinglike points, were accents also, acute and grave, on Valombroso’s speech, which was copious and confident. In the course, indeed, of our acquaintance, Valombroso was to convince us, in flourishing rhetoric, that in foresight, in acumen, in penetration, as also in the conquering simplicity of his system, there was no detective--save one perhaps--in all the world who could approach Valombroso.

The possible exception was the English amateur, Mr Holmes, no less. Valombroso had the greatest admiration for this certainly unique man.

“He knows very well,” he said, “that it is not the criminal who want to mystify, but the public who want to be mystified. So he keep the clue, which is the obvious one, in his own hand, and send all the newspapers astray on many false scents. Then the time come when they are lost, every Jack’s son of them, and he bring them back, very gradual and gentle, to the path which shall end to the view of Mr Holmes holding his prisoner in the handcuffs. But there he was from the first, though they knew it not. He did not want them to know, for where then would have shown his cleverness? We all scorn the obvious, do we not? It is so unexciting. There is no reputation to be gained by seizing on it--not in England. Mr Holmes adapt himself to a demand--he is very clever. But your police, they make the demand by their stupidity. ‘Look,’ they say, ‘there is a man stealing a handkerchief from a lady’s pocket! let us watch him and watch him to make sure that he does not want only to blow his nose and return it.’ But presently he steals another handkerchief, and then another, and so they say, ‘Three handkerchiefs are more than the allowance to one nose; he must be a thief; let us arrest him’; and by that time there are three ladies who are without the means to blow their noses. So again, if a murder is committed and the murderer suspect--do they arrest him and put him by the heels while they bring the charge home? Not at all; they watch that he commit himself, and they tell the newspapers in the meantime all of what they are thinking and doing so cleverly, as if that murderer was the only one out of all the country that not read the newspapers. But the public applaud, and that is enough. It is not my way. I do not walk twenty kilometres to get across the street. I say, ‘Show me my man and I go for him.’ Frankness, frankness always--that is my method. Plain dealing is the last thing the criminal expect. It is against his nature. He feels for ever in his expectation the sudden pinioning from the back. He has no fear that I shall walk up to his face and take him by the hand. Now, I say, show me this body in its cave, and I ask no more. I go straight to England to procure Mr Dalston’s extradition. It is enough for what it is until I get him here locked safe. Then I will proceed to formulate my case. It is well to bring down your bird before you put the pot on to boil.”

We were all very much impressed--all of us, that is to say, but Jannaway. He maintained his insular reserve, and insular prejudice in favour of insular methods.

“Handkerchers, indeed!” said he, with a withering intonation. “I’d back any one of our London pickpockets to take and blow his nose in _his_ handkercher and put it all back into his pocket without his knowing. He’d never guess but that it was the echo of himself a-blowing of his own trumpet.”

This lack of the right appreciation rather disillusioned us, I think, about Jannaway. Assurance is always so much more convincing than reserve. We sneer at conceit, but we allow it the privileges of its self-estimation. Valombroso must know himself so much better than we could possibly know him; and so, as his method was frankness, what reason had we to doubt his being the greatest detective in the world? It was simply Jannaway’s jealousy.

From Turin we went north to Aosta, an old walled and turreted town, situated in a beautiful fertile valley under the mountains, and rich in Roman remains. I have no time nor will to enlarge on the thousand wondering sensations which all this novel experience awoke in me. They were poignant enough, but they do not come into the story. More germane to that is it to describe something of the feelings with which I approached this Mecca of my pilgrimage, and thought, with an agitation hardly to be repressed, how it was here that my father and mother had come, stealing away from their party, to put a bond upon their love. How old and far away and strange it all seemed! a pretty antique pastoral, smelling of pot-pourri, until--ah! one could not long forget the end of it, sordid and horrible, behind those tumbling waters.

Yet now, being here, a very strange and sweet realisation of my relationship to the dead came to me--for the first time, I think, as a full conviction. Not even, seeing his young eyes laugh down from that portrait on the wall at Evercreech, had I ever felt him so near to me and so understanding as when, in this place, I looked up to the hills and thought of what was lying hidden from me in their quiet folds. Charlie Skene--the lover and young husband of those days--the boy, still less than my own present age as he lay up there at this moment, and yet my father! Was it not all ghastly pitiful! and to think how that dastard blow had fallen upon three lives in one. O, Mr Mark Dalston--if they would only hang in Italy!

And so one morning we went up to Cormayeur, and found the Hospice of St Marguerite hardly altered, by Geoletti’s showing, from the Hospice of twenty years ago. There was even the same Directrice presiding over its establishment--a vivid, brown-eyed old dame, with cavernous cheeks and a vulturine neck. She remembered Geoletti, and the gossip about his utter evanishment; she remembered the young English milord, and his no less startling, if more explainable, disappearance; she remembered very well, better than all the rest, the little demoiselle, white and pink, and the old aunt, grim and _de mauvaise humeur_, whose cruelty had betrayed to scandal what should have adorned a pretty tale of love and matrimony. And were the cold ashes of that scandal to be raked over for the benefit of a new generation? she protested. Alas! if the dead were to be consulted for their countenances, better bury all men in the Abbey La Sagra di S. Michele, where the soil would convert them in a little into natural mummies--a significant suggestion, to be sure.

I have given a French tone to these observations, but, as a matter of fact, they talked a hybrid patois, nearer Savoyard than Italian, up in these remote tributary valleys of the Aosta. Valombroso had to be our interpreter to its meaning; but he was always equal to any exigencies of talk. He loved the sound of his own tongue impartially in all the dialects of Babel. He could give us a reason, too, for the strange anachronisms of dress which still prevailed in part among these mountaineers--cocked hats, to wit, and bright-coloured long-skirted coats, and breeches and stockings and shoe buckles. They were the scum of an old upheaval of the ancient order risen to the top, and not yet entirely skimmed away by the spirit of democracy. As to the coquettish bibbed caps of the women, they were designed, after the fashion of other whited sepulchres, to conceal the disfigurement of the goître.

But now all this becomes likened in my memory to the crackling of thorns under a pot, while I turn to face the real tragic purpose of our mission.