Tracks in the Snow

think, even than you, Mr. Callaghan, and when, as often happened, we were travelling alone together, he used to insist on my doing as he liked in small arrangements, by the positive threat of violence. To do him justice he did not do it when he was sober, and though in those days I was a weakly and timid man compared to what I have become, I soon learned how to stop it altogether. But you can easily imagine that I did not love him; and a bitter feeling towards his chief companion is not a wholesome thing for a man to carry about through a year or two of hard work in that climate (for it is a climate! none of the dry heat and bracing winters you have in Northern India); still I hope I did not bear him malice so much for that as for other things. I have said I have no scruples, but I have no liking for ruffianism and cruelty. I hate them for the same reason for which I hate some pictures and some architecture, because they are not to my taste. But I had, in out-of-the-way places, among weak savages, where law and order had not come, to put up with seeing deeds done which people here at home would not believe were done by their countrymen, and which a man who has served his days in an honourable service like the Indian Civil could believe in least of all. He had kicked a wretched man to death (for I have no doubt he died of it) the day he died himself.

“But why do I make all these excuses? for, after all, what did I do that needs so much excuse? I told Longhurst plainly what I had done about the concessions and what I proposed to do for him, and he seemed to fall in with it all, and then he went home for a month’s holiday in England. I suppose he saw some lawyer, probably Thalberg, and got it into his head that he could make out a case of fraud against me. At any rate, when he returned, he seemed surly; he did not have it out with me straight, but he began to make extravagant demands of me and threaten me vaguely with some exposure if I did not give in to them, which of course I did not. Then he quarrelled about it in his cups, for the cups were getting more and more frequent, and several times over he got so violent as to put me in actual fear of my life. And at last, unhappily for him, it came to a real encounter. We had visited the island of Sulu, where I had reason to think we might establish a branch of our business, and after two or three days in an inland town we were returning to the coast, expecting to be picked up by a Chinese junk which was to take us back. The evening before we started down he produced a packet of documents and brandished it at me as if it contained something very damaging to me, and I could see plainly (for I have an eye for handwriting) that on the top of it was an envelope addressed by Peters. I am not justified in inferring from this that Peters⁠—who had seen Longhurst several times since he had seen me⁠—had again been repeating to him some malicious falsehood with which he had been stuffed before he left Saigon; but can you wonder that I did infer it? On the march down⁠—when we were alone, for we had sent on our servants before⁠—Longhurst began again more savagely than ever, and for about an hour he heaped all sorts of charges and vile insinuations upon me, which I answered for a while as patiently as I could. At last, breaking off in the middle of a curse, he fell into silence. He strode on angrily ahead for a hundred yards or so. Then at a rocky part of the path, where I was below him, he turned suddenly. He hurled at me a great stone which narrowly missed me, and then he came rushing and clambering back down the path at me. I fired (he turned as I fired). That was the end. Was it murder?” He paused and then braced himself up as he answered his own question. “Yes, it was, because I was angry, not afraid, and because I could easily have run away, only for some reason I did not mean to.

“But I am foolish to weary you with all this long preliminary story, for, after all, what do you care about Longhurst; it is Peters, your own friend, about whom you care. You think that he came to suspect me of murdering Longhurst, and I killed him for that; but as sure as I killed him, that was not⁠—that was not what made me do it.”

Vane-Cartwright sat for a long time with his face covered with his hands. At last he sat up and looked me straight in the face. “Mr. Driver, did you never suspect there was a romance in Peters’ life of which you knew nothing? I did know of it, and I honoured him for it, but I hated him for it too. Certainly you did not suspect that there was a romance in mine. It does not seem likely that a great passion should come to a calculating man like me, with the principles of conduct of which I have made no secret today. But such things do happen, and a great passion came late in life to me. And here is the cruel thing, which almost breaks my philosophy down, and makes me think that after all there is a curse upon crime. It ought to have enriched and ennobled my life, ought it not? It came at just the moment, in just the shape, and with all the attendant accidents to ruin