The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four (23 page)

The Man Who Stole Shakespeare

W
hen I had been in Shanghai but a few days, I rented an apartment in a narrow street off Avenue Edward VII where the rent was surprisingly low. The door at the foot of the stairs opened on the street beside a moneychanger’s stall, an inconspicuous place that one might pass a dozen times a day and never notice.

At night I would go down into the streets and wander about or sit by my window and watch people going about their varied business. From my corner windows I could watch a street intersection and an alleyway, and there were many curious things to see, and for one who finds his fellow man interesting, there was much to learn.

Late one afternoon when a drizzle of despondent rain had blown in from the sea, I decided to go out for coffee. Before reaching my destination, it began to pour, so I stepped into a bookstore for shelter.

This store dealt in secondhand books published in several languages and was a jumble of stacks, piles, and racks filled with books one never saw elsewhere and was unlikely to see again. I was hitch reading from Sterne when I saw him.

He was a small man and faded. His face had the scholarly expression that seems to come from familiarity with books, and he handled them tenderly. One could see at a glance that here was a man who knew a good book when he saw one, with a feeling for attractive format as well as content.

Yet when I glanced up, he was slipping a book into his pocket. Quickly, with almost a sense of personal guilt, I looked toward the clerk, but he was watching the rain. The theft had passed unobserved.

Now there is a sort of sympathy among those who love books, an understanding that knows no bounds of race, creed, or financial rating. If a man steals a necktie, he is a thief of the worst stripe. If he steals a car, nothing is too bad for him. But a man who steals a book is something else—unless it is my book.

My first thought when he slipped the book into his pocket was to wonder what book he wanted badly enough to steal. Not that there are only a few books worth stealing, for there are many. Yet I was curious. What, at the moment, had captured his interest? This small, gentle-seeming man with the frayed shirt collar and the worn topcoat?

When he left, I walked over to the place where the book had been and tried to recall what it might have been, for I had only just checked that shelf myself. Then I remembered.

It had been a slim, one-play-to-the-volume edition of Shakespeare. He had also examined Hakluyt’s
Voyages,
or at least one volume of the set, Huysmans’s
Against the Grain,
and Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy.

This was definitely a man I wished to know. Also, I was curious. Which play had he stolen? Was it the play itself he wished to read? Or was it for some particular passage in the play? Or to complete a set?

Turning quickly, I went to the door, and barely in time. My man was just disappearing in the direction of Thibet Road, and I started after him, hurrying.

At that, I almost missed him. He was just rounding a corner a block away, so he had been running, too. Was it the rain or a feeling of guilt?

The rain had faded into a drizzle once more. My man kept on, walking rapidly, but fortunately for me, he was both older than I, and his legs were not as long.

Whether he saw me, I do not know, but he led me a lively chase. It seemed scarcely possible for a man to go up and down so many streets, and he obviously knew Shanghai better than I. Yet suddenly he turned into an alley and dodged down a basement stairway. Following him, I got my foot in the door before he could close it.

He was frightened, and I could understand why. In those wilder years they found several thousand bodies on the street every year, and he perhaps had visions of adding his own to the list. Being slightly over six feet and broad in the shoulder, I must have looked dangerous in that dark passageway. Possibly he had visions of being found in the cold light of dawn with a slit throat, for such things were a common occurrence in Shanghai.

“Here!” he protested. “You can’t do this!” That I was doing it must have been obvious. “I’ll call an officer!”

“And have to explain that volume of Shakespeare in your pocket?” I suggested.

That took the wind out of him, and he backed into the room, a neat enough place, sparsely furnished except for the books. The walls were lined with them.

“Now see here,” I said, “you’ve nothing to worry about. I don’t intend to report you, and I’m not going to rob you. I’m simply interested in books and in the books people want enough to steal.”

“You’re not from the bookstore?”

“Nothing of the kind. I saw you slip the book into your pocket, and although I did not approve, I was curious as to what you had stolen and why.” I held out my hand. “May I see?”

He shook his head, then stood back and watched me, finally taking off his coat. He handed me the book from his pocket, which was a copy of
Henry IV,
bound in gray cloth with a thin gold line around the edges. The book was almost new and felt good to the hands. I turned the pages, reading a line or two. “You’ve a lot of books,” I said, glancing at the shelves. “May I look?”

He nodded, then stepped back and sat down. He certainly was not at ease, and I didn’t blame him.

The first book I saw was Wells’s
Outline of History.
“Everybody has that one,” I commented.

“Yes,” he said hesitantly.

Ibsen was there, and Strindberg, Chekhov, and Tolstoi. A couple of volumes by Thomas Hardy were wedged alongside three by Dostoevsky. There were books by Voltaire, Cervantes, Carlyle, Goldoni, Byron, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Cabell, and Hume.

The next book stopped me short, and I had to look again to make sure the bookshelf wasn’t kidding. It was a quaint, old-fashioned, long-out-of-date
Home Medical Advisor
by some Dr. Felix Peabody, published by some long-extinct publisher whose state of mind must have been curious, indeed.

“Where in the world did you get this?” I asked. “It seems out of place stuck in between Hegel and Hudson.”

He smiled oddly, his eyes flickering to mine and then away. He looked nervous, and since then I have often wondered what he must have been thinking and what went through his mind at that moment.

Scanning the shelves to take stock of what his interests were, I came upon another queer one. It was between Laurence Sterne’s
Sentimental Journey
and George Gissing’s
Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.
It was
Elsie’s Girlhood.

After that I had to sit down. This man was definitely some kind of a nut. I glanced at him, and he squirmed a little. Evidently he had seen my surprise at the placement of some of the books or the fact that he had them at all.

“You must read a lot,” I suggested. “You’ve a lot of good books here.”

“Yes,” he said; then he leaned forward, suddenly eager to talk. “It’s nice to have them. I just like to own them, to take them in my hands and turn them over and to know that so much that these men felt, saw, thought, and understood is here. It is almost like knowing the men themselves.”

“It might be better,” I said. “Some of these men were pretty miserable in themselves, but their work is magnificent.”

He started to rise, then sat down again suddenly as though he expected me to order him to stay where he was.

“Do you read a lot?” he asked.

“All the time,” I said. “Maybe even too much. At least when I have books or access to them.”

“My eyes”—he passed a hand over them—“I’m having trouble with my glasses. I wonder if you’d read to me sometime? That is,” he added hastily, “if you have the time.”

“That’s the one thing I’ve plenty of,” I said. “At least until I catch a ship. Sure I’ll read to you.”

As a matter of fact, he had books here to which I’d heard all my life but had found no chance to read. “If you want, I’ll read some right now.”

It was raining outside, and I was blocks from my small apartment. He made coffee, and I read to him, starting with
The Return of the Native
for no reason other than that I’d not read it and it was close at hand. Then I read a bit from
Tales of Mean Streets
and some from Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Nearly every day after that I went to see Mr. Meacham. How he made his living, I never knew. He had some connection, I believe, with one of the old trading companies, for he seemed very familiar with the interior of China and with people there.

The oddity of it appealed to some irony in my sense of humor. A few weeks before I’d been coiling wet lines on the forecastle head of a tramp steamer, and now here I was, reading to this quaint old gentleman in his ill-fitting suit.

He possessed an insatiable curiosity about the lives of the authors and questioned me about them by the hour. That puzzled me, for a reader just naturally acquires some such knowledge just by reading the bookjackets, and in the natural course of events a man can learn a good deal about the personal lives of authors. However, he seemed to know nothing about them and was avid for detail.

There was much about him that disturbed me. He was so obviously alone, seemingly cut off from everything. He wasn’t bold enough to make friends, and there seemed to be no reason why anybody should take the trouble to know him. He talked very little, and I never did know where he had come from or how he happened to be in such a place as Shanghai, for he was a contradiction to everything one thinks of when one considers Shanghai. You could imagine him in Pittsburgh, St. Louis, or London, in Glasgow or Peoria, but never in such a place as this.

One day when I came in, I said, “Well, you name it. What shall I read today?”

He hesitated, flushed, then took a book from the shelf and handed it to me. It was
Elsie’s Girlhood,
a book of advice to a young girl about to become a woman.

For a minute I thought he was kidding, and then I was sure it couldn’t be anything else. “Not today,” I said. “I’ll try Leacock.”

When I remembered it afterward, I remembered he had not seemed to be kidding. He had been perfectly serious and obviously embarrassed when I put him off so abruptly. He hesitated, then put the book away, and when I returned the next day, the book was no longer on the shelf. It had disappeared.

It was that day that I guessed his secret. I was reading at the time, and it just hit me all of a sudden. It left me completely flabbergasted, and for a moment I stared at the printed page from which I was reading, my mouth open for words that would not come.

Yes, I told myself, that had to be it. There was no other solution. All the pieces suddenly fell into place, the books scattered together without plan or style, with here and there books that seemed so totally out of place and unrelated.

That night I read later than ever before.

Then I got a job. Dou Yu-seng offered to keep the rent paid on my apartment (I always suspected he owned the building) while I took care of a little job up the river. I knew but little about him but enough to know of affiliations with various war lords and at least one secret society. However, what I was to do was legitimate.

Yet when I left, I kept thinking of old Mr. Meacham. He would be alone again, with nobody to read to him.

Alone? Remembering those walls lined with books, I knew he would never actually be alone. They were books bought here and there, books given him by people moving away, books taken from junk heaps, but each one of them represented a life, somebody’s dream, somebody’s hope or idea, and all were there where he could touch them, feel them, know their presence.

No, he would not be alone, for he would remember Ivan Karamazov, who did not want millions but an answer to his questions. He would remember those others who would people his memories and walk through the shadows of his rooms:
Jean Valjean, Julien Sorel, Mr. John Oakhurst,
gambler, and, of course, the little man who was
the friend of Napoleon.

He knew line after line from the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare and a lot of Keats, Kipling, Li Po, and
Kasidah.
He would never really be alone now.

He never guessed that I knew, and probably for years he had hidden his secret, ashamed to let anyone know that he, who was nearly seventy and who so loved knowledge, had never learned to read.

The Dancing Kate

I
t was a strip of grayish-yellow sand caught in the gaunt fingers of the reef like an upturned belly except here and there where the reef had been longest above the sea. Much of the reef was drying, and elsewhere the broken teeth of the coral formed ugly ridges flanked by a few black, half-submerged boulders.

At one end of the bar the stark white ribs of an old ship thrust themselves from the sand, and nearby lay the rusting hulk of an iron freighter. It had been there more than sixty years.

For eighteen miles in a northeast and southwest direction the reef lay across the face of the Coral Sea. At its widest, no more than three miles but narrowing to less than a mile. A strip of jagged coral and white water lost in the remote emptiness of the Pacific. The long dun swells of the sea hammered against the outer rocks, and overhead the towering vastness of the sky became a shell of copper with the afternoon sun.

At the near end of the bar, protected from the breaking seas in all but a hurricane, a hollow of rock formed a natural cistern. In the bottom were a few scant inches of doubtful water. Beside it, he squatted in torn dungarees and battered sneakers.

“Three days,” he estimated, staring into the cistern, eyes squinting against the surrounding glare. “Three days if I’m careful, and after that I’m washed up.”

After that—thirst. The white, awful glare of the tropical sun, a parched throat, baking flesh, a few days or hours of delirium, and then a long time of lying wide-eyed to the sky before the gulls and the crabs finished the remains.

He had no doubt as to where he was. The chart had been given him in Port Darwin and was worn along the creases, but there was no crease where this reef lay, hence no doubt of his position. He was sitting on a lonely reef, avoided by shipping, right in the middle of nowhere. His position was approximately 10°45' S, 155°51' E.

The nearest land was eighty-two miles off and it might as well be eighty-two thousand.

It started with the gold. The schooner on which he had been second mate had dropped anchor in Bugoiya Harbor, but it was not fit anchorage, so they could remain only a matter of hours. He was on the small wharf superintending the loading of some cargo when a boy approached him.

He was a slender native boy with very large, beautiful eyes. When the boy was near him, he spoke, not looking at him. “Man say you come. Speak nobody.”

“Come? Come where?”

“You come. I show you.”

“I’m busy, boy. I don’t want a girl now.”

“No girl. Man die soon. He say
please,
you come?”

Dugan looked at his watch. They were loading the last cargo now, but they would not sail for at least an hour.

“How far is it?”

“Ten minutes—you see.”

A man was dying? But why come to him? Still, in these islands odd things were always happening, and he was a curious man.

The captain was coming along the wharf, and he walked over to him. “Cap? Something’s come up. This boy wants to take me to some man who is dying. Says not to say anything, and he’s only ten minutes away.”

Douglas glanced at the boy, then at his watch. “All right, but we’ve less than an hour. If we leave before you get back, we’ll be several days at Woodlark or Murua or whatever they call it. There’s a man in a village who is a friend of mine. Just ask for Sam. He will sail you over there.”

“No need for that. I’ll be right back.”

Douglas glanced at him, a faint humor showing. “Dugan, I’ve been in these islands for fifty years. A man never knows—never.”

Misima, although only about twenty miles long and four or five miles wide, was densely wooded, and the mountains lifted from a thousand to three thousand feet, and as the south side was very steep, most of the villages were along the northern shore.

The boy had walked off and was standing near a palm tree idly tossing stones into the lagoon. Taking off his cap, he walked away from the wharf, wiping the sweat from his brow. He walked back from the shore and then turned and strolled toward the shade, pausing occasionally. The boy had disappeared under the trees.

At the edge of the trees Dugan sat down, leaning his back against one. After a moment a stone landed near his foot, and he glimpsed the boy behind a tree about thirty yards off. Dugan got up, stretched, and hands in his pockets, strolled along in the shade, getting deeper and deeper until he saw the boy standing in a little-used path.

They walked along for half a mile. Dugan glanced at his watch. He would have to hurry.

Suddenly the boy ducked into the brush, holding a branch aside for him. About thirty yards away he saw a small shanty with a thin column of smoke lifting it. The boy ran ahead, leading the way.

There was a young woman there who, from her looks, was probably the boy’s mother. Inside, an old man lay on an army cot. His eyes were sunken into his head, and his cheeks were gaunt. He clutched Dugan’s hand. His fingers were thin and clawlike. “You must help me. You are with Douglas?”

“I am.”

“Good! He is honest. Everybody knows that of him. I need your help.” He paused for a minute, his breathing hoarse and labored. “I have a granddaughter. She is in Sydney.” He put his hand on a coarse brown sack under his cot. “She must have this.”

“What is it?”

“It is gold. There are men here who will steal it when I die. It must go to my granddaughter. You take it to her, and you keep half. You will do this?”

Sydney? He was not going to Sydney; still, one could sell it and send the money to Sydney. He pressed a paper into his hand. “Her name and address. Get it to her—somehow. You can do it. You will do it.”

“Look,” he protested, “I am not going to Sydney. When I leave Douglas, I’m going to Singapore and catch a ship for home—or going on to India.”

“You must! They will steal it. They have tried, and they are waiting. If they think you have it, they will rob you. I know them.”

“Well.” He hesitated. He had to be getting back. Douglas’s appointment at Woodlark was important to him. He would wait for no man in such a case, least of all for me, who had been with him only a few weeks, the man thought. “All right, give me the gold. I’ve little time.”

The woman dragged the sack from under the cot, and he stooped to lift it. It was much heavier than it appeared. The old man smiled. “Gold is always heavy, my friend. Too heavy for many men to bear.”

Dugan straightened and took the offered hand; then he walked out of the shack, carrying the gold.

It
was
heavy. Once aboard the schooner it would be no problem. He glanced at his watch and swore. He was already too late, and the tide—

When he reached the small harbor, it was too late. The schooner was gone!

He stood, staring. Immediately he was apprehensive. He was left on an island with about two dozen white people of whom he knew nothing and some fifteen hundred natives of whom he knew less. Moreover, there was always a drifting population, off the vessels of one kind or another that haunt Indonesian seas.

Woodlark was eighty miles away. He knew that much depended on the schooner being there in time to complete a deal for cargo that otherwise would go to another vessel. He had been left behind. He was alone.

A stocky bearded man approached. He wore dirty khakis, a watch cap, and the khaki coat hung loose. Did he have a gun? Dugan would have bet that he had.

From descriptions he was sure he knew the man.

“Looks like they’ve gone off and left you,” he commented, glancing at the sack.

“They’ll be back.”

“Douglas? Don’t bet on it. He calls in here about once every six months. Sometimes it’s a whole year.”

“It’s different this time,” he lied. “He’s spending about three months in the Louisiades and Solomons. He expects to be calling in here three or four times, so I’ll just settle down and wait.”

“We could make a deal,” the man said. “I could sail you to the Solomons.” He jerked his head. “I’ve got a good boat, and I often take the trip. Come along.”

“Why? When he’s coming back here?”

Deliberately he turned his back and walk away. Zimmerman—this would be Zimmerman.

At the trade store they told him where he could find Sam, and he found him, a wiry little man with sad blue eyes and thin hair. He shook his head. “I have to live here.”

“Douglas said—”

“I can imagine. I like Douglas. He’s one of the best men in the islands, but he doesn’t live here. I do. If you get out of here, you’ll do it on your own. I can tell you something else. Nobody will take the chance. You make a deal with them, or you wait until Douglas comes back.”

Twice he saw the boy, and he was watching him. He lingered near the trees where he’d been when he first followed him, so he started back. He’d have to see the old man, and packing that gold was getting to be a nuisance.

When he got back to the shack, the woman was at the door, mashing something in a wooden dish. “He’s dying,” she said. “He hasn’t talked since you left.”

“Who is it?” The voice was very weak.

He went inside and told the old man he would have to leave his gold. The schooner was gone, and he had no way to get to Woodlark and overtake her.

“Take my boat,” he said.

His eyes closed, and nothing Dugan said brought any response. And Dugan tried. He wanted to get away, but he wanted no more of his gold. From Sam’s manner he knew Zimmerman was trouble, very serious trouble.

The woman was standing there. “He is dying,” she said.

“He has a boat?”

She pointed and he walked through the trees to the shore. It was there, tied up to a small dock. It wasn’t much of a boat, and they’d make a fit pair, for he wasn’t much of a small-boat sailor. His seamanship had been picked up on freighters and one tanker, and his time in sail was limited to a few weeks where somebody else was giving orders. He’d done one job of single handing with a small boat and been shot with luck. On one of the most dangerous seas he had experienced nothing but flying-fish weather all the way. Still, it was only eighty miles to Woodlark, and if the weather remained unchanged, he’d be all right. If—

The boy was there. “Three of them,” he said, “three mans—very bad mans.” And then he added, “They come tonight, I think.”

So how much of a choice did he have? He left at dark or before dark, or he stayed and took a chance on being murdered or killing somebody. Anyway, the sea was quiet, only a little breeze running, and eighty miles was nothing.

The best way to cope with trouble was to avoid it, to stay away from where trouble was apt to be.

The only thing between where he was and Woodlark were the Alcesters. He had sailed by them before and would know them when he saw them.

He glanced down at the boy. “I’ll leave the boat on Woodlark.”

The boy shrugged. “Wherever.”

He had shoved off at sundown with a good breeze blowing, and even with his caution he made good time, or what was good time for him. He had the Alcesters abeam before daybreak, but there was a boat behind him that was coming on fast. His silhouette was low, so he lowered the sail a little to provide even less and gradually eased the helm over and slid in behind one of the Alcesters.

It was nearing daylight, but suddenly it began to grow darker, and the wind began blowing in little puffs, and there was a brief spatter of rain. He was running before the wind when the storm came, and from that time on it was sheer panic. On the second or third day—he could not remember which—he piled up on the reef, a big wave carrying the boat over into the lagoon, ripping the hull open somewhere en route.

When daylight came again, the storm was blowing itself out; the boat was gone but for a length of broken mast and a piece of the forward section that contained a spare sail, some line, and some odds and ends of canned goods. And the gold.

He had saved the gold.

Dawn was a sickly thing on that first morning, with the northern sun remote behind gray clouds. He made his way along the reef, avoiding the lacerating edges of the coral until he reached the bar.

The old freighter, one mast still standing and a gaping hole in her hull, was high and dry on the sandbar. A flock of gulls rose screaming into the air as he approached, and he walked over the soft sand into the hole.

The deck above him was solid and strong. Far down there was a hatch, its cover stove in, which allowed a little light at the forward end. Here all was secure. Sand had washed in, making a hard-packed floor. Dugan put down a tin of biscuits and the few cans he had brought along and went back outside.

It was just one hundred and fifty steps to the water of the lagoon and the hollow in the reef where rain had collected in the natural cistern. The hollow in the reef was just three feet deep and about the size of a washtub. It was half full, and the water, although fresh, was warm.

For the moment he had food, shelter, and water.

Gathering driftwood, of which there was a good bit, he built a shade over the cistern that would prevent a too rapid evaporation but could be removed when it rained.

There would be fish, shellfish, and crabs. For a time there might be eggs, and the first thing he must do would be to cover the reef, as much of it as he could reach, and see what he could find that was useful. Then he must get a fragment of that torn canvas and make a pennant to fly from the mast of the wrecked ship.

The work kept him busy. Scrambling over the reef, careful not to slip into a hole or break an ankle on the rough, often slippery rock, he gathered driftwood. Slowly the several piles grew.

At night he sat beside his fire in the hulk and ate fish and a biscuit.

After a while he lost all awareness of the sea. It was there, all around him, and it was empty. Occasionally, when his eyes strayed that way, he saw distant smoke. He rarely looked at the sack of gold.

For the first time he deliberately faced his situation. From his pocket he took the worn chart, but he did not need it to face the fact. The reef was a lonely, isolated spot in the Coral Sea, in an area where ships came but rarely. Aside from the sandbar itself there was only the ruffled water and a few black stumps of coral rising above it.