“And now I must tell you about Longhurst. He had been at some time, I suppose, a clever man; at least he had a wonderful store of practical knowledge about forests, mining and other matters, and he had travelled a great deal in all parts of that region of the world, and picked up many things which he wanted to turn to account. He had made a little money which he wished to increase, and he had a great scheme of organising and developing the trade of Southeastern Asia and its islands in various valuable kinds of timber, spices, gum, shellac, etc., etc. He promised anyone who could join him that in a few years, by exploiting certain yet undeveloped but most profitable sources of supply, he could get a monopoly of several important trades, the sago trade, for example. He set forth his scheme to the company generally at the English Club the first time I met him, and everybody laughed at him except me, who saw that if he got into the right hands there was something to be made out of his discoveries for him and other people. And as a matter of fact we did make something of them, more than I expected, but not what he expected. I did not make a large sum out of our joint venture, not much more than I could have made by staying where I was, but I got the knowledge of Eastern commerce, which has enabled me since to do what I have done.
“I saw you smile just now, Mr. Callaghan, when I spoke of Longhurst getting into the right hands. Well he did; and I did not. He had been, as I said, a clever man, and there was something taking about him with his bluff, frank, burly air, but he was going off when I met him. People do go downhill if they spend all their lives in odd corners of the earth; and, though I did not know it at first, he had taken the surest road downhill, for he had begun to drink, and very soon it gained upon him like wildfire. When he once goes wrong no one can be so wrongheaded as a man like that, who thinks that he knows the world from having knocked about it a great deal doing nothing settled; and I should have found Longhurst difficult to deal with in any case. As it was, Longhurst dined with Peters the night before we left Saigon together. On the first day of our voyage he was very surly to me, and he said, ‘I heard something funny about you last night, Master Cartwright. I wish I had heard it before, that’s all.’ When I fired up and told him to say straight out what it was, he looked at me offensively, and went off into the smoking-room of the steamer to have another drink. That was not a cheerful beginning of our companionship, and I had my suspicion as to whom I ought to thank for it. I believe the same talebearer that I mentioned before had been telling Peters some yarn about my arrangements with Longhurst, which looked as if I was trying to swindle him, and that Peters had passed it on. I very soon found that Longhurst was not so simple as he seemed. I daresay he had meant honestly enough by me at first, but having got it into his thick head that I was a little too sharp, he made up his mind to be the sharper of the two; and the result was that if I was to be safe in dealing with him I must take care to keep the upper hand of him, and before long I made up my mind that my partner should go out of the firm. I could have made his fortune if he would have let me, but I meant that the concern should be mine and not his, and I did not disguise it from him. That was my great mistake. I do not know what story, if any, you have picked up about my dealings with Longhurst. He put about many stories when we had begun to quarrel—for he had begun by that time, if not before, to drink freely—but the matter that we finally quarrelled about was this. Of the various concessions which we started by obtaining (at least I started by obtaining them; that was to be my great contribution to the partnership), two only proved of very great importance—one was from the Spanish Government of the Philippines and the other from the Government of Anam, and these, as it happened, were for three and four years, renewable under certain conditions but also revocable earlier in certain events. There was no trickery about that, though Longhurst may have thought there was. I simply could not get larger concessions with the means of persuasion (bribery, in other words) at our command. Subsequently I got renewals and extensions of these concessions to myself alone. To the best of my belief then and now the transaction held water in law and in equity, but whatever a lawyer might think of it, the common sense was this: Longhurst had become so reckless and so muddleheaded that nothing could any longer prosper under his control, if he had the control, and besides that, I never could have got the extended concessions at all if he was to be one of the concessionaires. There are some things which an Eastern Government or a Spanish Government cannot stand, and Longhurst’s treatment of the natives was one of them. But I must go back a bit. There were other things besides this which contributed to our quarrel. For one thing, odd as it may sound in speaking of two grown-up men, Longhurst bullied me—physically bullied me. He was a very powerful man, more so, I should
