myself humming a tune.
It was an old hymn which the Salvation Army used to play in the Cape Town streets when I was a schoolboy. I hadn’t heard it or thought of it for thirty years. But I remembered the tune very clearly, a pretty, catchy thing like an early Victorian drawing-room ballad, and I remembered the words of the chorus—
On the other side of Jordan
In the green fields of Eden,
Where the Tree of Life is blooming,
There is rest for you.
I marched off to Greenslade’s room and found him lying wide awake staring at the ceiling, with the lamp by his bedside lit. I must have broken in on some train of thought, for he looked at me crossly.
‘I’ve got your tune,’ I said, and I whistled it, and then quoted what words I remembered.
‘Tune be blowed,’ he said. ‘I never heard it before.’ But he hummed it after me, and made me repeat the words several times.
‘No good, I’m afraid. It doesn’t seem to hang on to anything. Lord, this is a fool’s game. I’m off to sleep.’
But three minutes later came a knock at my dressing-room door, and Greenslade entered. I saw by his eyes that he was excited.
‘It’s the tune all right. I can’t explain why, but those three blessed facts of mine fit into it like prawns in an aspic. I’m feeling my way towards the light now. I thought I’d just tell you, for you may sleep better for hearing it.
I slept like a log, and went down to breakfast feeling more cheerful than I had felt for several days. But the doctor seemed to have had a poor night. His eyes looked gummy and heavy, and he had ruffled his hair out of all hope of order. I knew that trick of his; when his hair began to stick up at the back he was out of sorts, either in mind or body. I noticed that he had got himself up in knickerbockers and thick shoes.
After breakfast he showed no inclination to smoke. ‘I feel as if I were going to be beaten on the post,’ he groaned. ‘I’m a complete convert to your view, Dick. I heard my three facts and didn’t invent them. What’s more, my three are definitely linked with the three in those miscreants’ doggerel. That tune proves it, for it talks about the “fields of Eden” and yet is identified in my memory with my three which didn’t mention Eden. That’s a tremendous point and proves we’re on the right road. But I’m hanged if I can get a step farther. Wherever I heard the facts I heard the tune, but I’m no nearer finding out that place. I’ve got one bearing, and I need a second to give me the point of intersection I want, and how the deuce I’m to get it I don’t know.’
Greenslade was now keener even than I was on the chase, and indeed his lean anxious face was uncommonly like an old hound’s. I asked him what he was going to do.
‘At ten o’clock precisely I start on a walk—right round the head of the Windrush and home by the Forest. It’s going to be a thirty-mile stride at a steady four and a half miles an hour, which, with half an hour for lunch, will get me back here before six. I’m doing to drug my body and mind in to apathy by hard exercise. Then I shall have a hot bath and a good dinner, and after that, when I’m properly fallow, I may get the revelation. The mistake I made yesterday was in trying to think.’
It was a gleamy blustering March morning, the very weather for a walk, and I would have liked to accompany him. As it was I watched his long legs striding up the field we call Big Pasture, and then gave up the day to the job of putting Loch Leven fry into one of the ponds—a task so supremely muddy and wet that I had very little leisure to think of other things. In the afternoon I rode over to the market-town to see my builder, and got back only just before dinner to learn that Greenslade had returned. He wag now wallowing in a hot bath, according to his programme.
At dinner he seemed to be in better spirits. The wind had heightened his colour, and given him a ferocious appetite, and the 1906 Clicquot, which I regard as the proper drink after a hard day, gave him the stimulus he needed. He talked as he had talked three nights ago, before this business got us in its clutches. Mary disappeared after dinner, and we sat ourselves in big chairs before the library fire, like two drowsy men who have had a busy day in the open air. I thought I had better say nothing till he chose to speak.
He was silent for a long time, and then he laughed not very mirthfully.
‘I’m as far off it as ever. All day I’ve been letting my mind wander and measuring off miles with my two legs like a pair of compasses.
But nothing has come to me. No word yet of that confounded cross-bearing I need. I might have heard that tune in any one of a thousand parts of the globe. You see, my rackety life is a disadvantage—I’ve had too many different sorts of experience. If I’d been a curate all my days in one village it would have been easier.’
I waited, and he went on, speaking not to me but to the fire: ‘I’ve got an impression so strong that it amounts to certainty that I never heard the words “Western Highlands.” It was something like it, but not that.’
‘Western Islands,’ I suggested.
‘What could they be?’
‘I think I’ve heard the phrase used about the islands off the west coast of Ireland. Does that help you?’
He shook his head. ‘No good. I’ve never been in Ireland.’
After that he was silent again, staring at the fire, while I smoked opposite him, feeling pretty blank and dispirited. I realised that I had banked more than I knew on this line of inquiry which seemed to be coming to nothing.
Then suddenly there happened one of those trivial things which look like accidents but I believe are part of the reasoned government of the universe.
I leaned forward to knock out the ashes of my pipe against the stone edge of the hearth. I hammered harder than I intended, and the pipe, which was an old one, broke off at the bowl. I exclaimed irritably, for I hate to lose an old pipe, and then pulled up sharp at the sight of Greenslade.
He was staring open-mouthed at the fragments in my hand, and his eyes were those of a man whose thoughts are far away. He held up one hand, while I froze into silence. Then the tension relaxed, and he dropped back into his chair with a sigh.
‘The cross-bearing!’ he said. ‘I’ve got it… Medina.’
Then he laughed at my puzzled face.
‘I’m not mad, Dick. I once talked to a man, and as we talked he broke the bowl of his pipe as you have just done. He was the man who hummed the hymn tune, and though I haven’t the remotest recollection of what he said, I am as certain as that I am alive that he gave me the three facts which sunk into the abyss of my subconscious memory. Wait a minute. Yes. I see it as plain as I see you. He broke his pipe just as you have done, and some time or other he hummed that tune.’
‘Who was he?’ I asked, but Greenslade disregarded the question. He was telling his story in his own way, with his eyes still abstracted as if he were looking down a long corridor of memory.
‘I was staying at the Bull at Hanham—shooting wild-fowl on the sea marshes. I had the place to myself, for it wasn’t weather for a country pub, but late one night a car broke down outside, and the owner and his chauffeur had to put up at the Bull. Oddly enough I knew the man. He had been at one of the big shoots at Rousham Thorpe and was
