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Ebook has 2670 lines and 70452 words, and 54 pages

Commentator: William McFee

BLACK'ERCHIEF DICK

BLACK'ERCHIEF DICK

BY MARGERY ALLINGHAM

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM McFEE

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1923

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

DEDICATED TO HAL GRAME

IN THE HOPE THAT HE WILL BE SATISFIED THAT I HAVE DONE MY BEST TO FULFIL THE PROMISE I MADE TO HIM TO TELL THE STORY OF ANNY AND TO "TELL TRUE"

INTRODUCTION

In the sense of requiring elucidation or apology, this novel needs no introduction. The young lady who wrote it about two years ago, when she was eighteen, has already abandoned this work to publishers and other grown-ups, and with admirable professional good sense, is working upon fresh enterprises.

Nothing of the sort is to be found in this tale of eastern England during the Restoration. And yet, while we may accept the unusual spectacle of a modern schoolgirl writing a red-blooded adventure story and privately poking fun at psychoanalysts and their dupes, we are justified in a certain curiosity as to the genesis of such a book. That curiosity the introduction is designed to assuage.

And as the years followed one another in that peculiar progression which is neither arithmetical nor geometrical, but rather telescopic, whereby the young close up upon us and make us uneasily aware of our own slothful deficiencies, it became increasingly evident that in spite of the secret discouragement of wise parents, who did their best to hold themselves up as Awful Warnings, Margery Allingham would sooner or later express herself in one of the arts. Which art she would choose seemed equally certain until the family circle learned that she proposed to "go in" for elocution.

All this, even though it included illustrated interviews in the London press, was regarded by the chief protagonist as the inept reaction of grown-ups to a very ordinary achievement of modern youth. For it should be borne in mind that modern youth, while it is not particularly impressed with the performances or the philosophies of the preceding generation, is perfectly willing to abide by the rules of the economic game. The activities enumerated above were by no means the spectacular antics of a pampered parasite. Money was being earned in a highly diverting fashion. It appears that not only are films adapted from books, but books and stories are redistilled back from the films. Should money be necessary for scenery or costumes, it was Margery Allingham's habit to witness a few pictures, transmute them into fiction and send them to the weekly journals that publish such stories. The picture evoked by a series of engaging letters written over the past three years is that of a shrewd and competent being from another world struggling with the stupidities and prejudices of a crowd of tottering half-wits upon the verge of dissolution. Youth seems to be having a tough time of it in England, as well as in America. There is nothing new about this, according to our novelist. "The modern girl is simply Miss 1840 without her petticoats," is her definition, based on an attentive study of Jane Austen's heroines. The trouble lies, not with youth, but with middle age, whose intellect tends to ossify more rapidly than of yore. It is an interesting theory, though evidently not designed to placate either publishers or the writers of introductions.

To come to grips with the question of the origin of this particular novel, however, is a delicate matter. We find ourselves on enchanted ground. When a young lady of eighteen writes a novel in four months and calmly asserts that the story came to her out of the air, as it were, communicated by so-called automatic writing, the average grown-up hesitates. He has a foolish predilection for sober realities, and is reluctant to admit familiar spirits, as it were, to the family circle. Modern youth, dragging her family after her, calls up the ghosts of departed rapscallions, witches, and serving-wenches, and forthwith sits down to fashion a stirring tale.

The novel, then, is a story within a story. The latter has for me a peculiar fascination. Knowing the characters who sat round that table in the house on Mersea Island, knowing the Island itself and the surrounding fenland, I wanted to write a story about them. I have repressed this desire, contenting myself with recounting to occasional groups of friends the amazing facts. Now that the novel has been written, and published in England and America by people who know little and care nothing about its origins, judging it merely as a piece of fiction commercially available, the opportunity arrives to reveal briefly the unusual circumstances out of which the tale was born.

That part of England called East Anglia has preserved through many centuries the salient features of the landscape. As Charles Dickens said of the French-Flemish country, it is neither bold nor diversified, being in fact a sort of continuation of that country on the other side of the shallow and recent North Sea. And indeed what Dickens went on to say of his Flemish-French country, that it was three parts Flemish and one part French, might be paraphrased for East Anglia as three parts English and one part Low Country, or three parts land and one part water. The shores emerge imperceptibly from the gray waste of the North Sea, with stretches of low-tide mud that shine with a metallic lustre beyond the dunes. The sea is loth to retreat, winding in and out among the fields, so that one is startled, driving along the road from Colchester towards Mersea, to see a huge brown wherry aground behind the dikes, many miles from the sea-lanes outside. And from Canvey Island, which is fairly in the Thames Estuary below Tilbury, to Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk Coast, the sea interpenetrates the land so deeply and with so many loops and backwaters, that the whole coast, to high tide, is compacted of lonely islands, with here and there a house and the square tower of an ancient little Saxon church showing above some weather-worn trees on the landward side. Bleak and perishing cold in the winter, there is a quiet loveliness in the summers there appealing strongly to unfashionable folk who seek the elemental sanctuaries of remote harbours and salt winds driving the thick white clouds athwart a sky of palest azure.

In such surroundings and with a practicable house for sleep, you come close to England. In such surroundings, on a fare of beef and cheese and beer, an English family might conceivably become so homogeneously identified with the spirit of the place that they could move at will up and down the centuries, assuming the thoughts and memories of any disembodied intelligences still anchored to their earthly haunts. So at least it emerges, reading the sober evidence before us, as those four set it down, signing it with their several names and styles, and asserting their right as truthful subjects to be believed.

And what they say is this: In August, 1920, being in their cottage on Mersea Island, on an evening that had turned to rain, the time hung heavily and it was suggested they pass an hour with the glass. The ordinary materials were soon provided, being no more than the alphabet on paper slips, arranged in a circle on the table with a common tumbler, from which ale is drunk in those parts, inverted in the middle. Nothing remained save to select some feasible subject.

One lay to their hand. While none of the company had practised the historical method in their fictions, since they lacked the special knowledge of bygone ways and speech such work demands, they had often discussed a legend persisting in the island, that a near-by tavern, long since destroyed, had been the scene of a tragedy. Old people in the village said they had seen the ghost, which haunted a house known as The Myth. "Let us," said someone, "call up the landlord of the Ship Inn. Perhaps," they added amidst some laughter, "he will reply."

He did! Amid great yet repressed excitement, the mysterious glass slid to and fro, spelling out a name. As far as can be ascertained, for once the exact requirements of time and place and method came together, and some sort of communication was established across the "gateless barrier" that separates us from the souls who linger near the scenes of their earthly existence, loth to wander far from their native air. Night after night, for long hours, these inexperienced folk sat round their table holding converse with the spirits that syllable men's names, piecing together the fragments, evoking new witnesses to check up obscure allusions, puzzling over the illiterate and archaic words and phrases which none of them, by any possible chance, could have heard before.

WILLIAM MCFEE.

BLACK'ERCHIEF DICK

"Dangerous! Why, there's no trade from here to the Indies more dangerous than ours. I've been about a bit, and mind you I know."

Mat Turnby shifted his large body to a position of greater ease, tilted slightly the rum cask on which he was sitting, and leaned back against the fully rigged mast, balancing himself carefully in accordance with the gentle roll of the ship.

"Oh, I don't know about that, Mat," remarked a wiry, black-bearded man, who squatted on a coil of rope some six feet away. "I've been on this ship two years now, and how many fights have I had with the Preventative folk? Three! How many hands did we lose in the lot? Eleven! That's not danger!"

"Ah!" said the other, wisely nodding his head, "maybe, maybe, Blueneck, but it's some nine months since we last went foul them coastguards and since then we've been coming and going as though the damned old Channel belonged to us. Such scatter-brained tricks don't pay in the end."

"You be careful what you're saying, Mat Turnby," piped a shivering, miserable, little man, who was trying to protect himself from the cutting February wind with a ragged, parti-coloured blanket which he continually wrapped and unwrapped about his skeleton-like shoulders, "you be careful what you're saying. All kinds o' things on this ship have ears," and he nodded once or twice significantly.

The big man moved uneasily on his unstable seat, but he answered boldly enough:

"I saying? Here, you mind what you're saying, you snivelling rat! Saying? I'm not saying aught as I am ashamed of--I say these daring tricks don't pay in the end--and--and--they don't," he finished abruptly.

"Oh! it's not for the likes o' us to talk about what the Captain does," said the little man whiningly. He snuffled noisily and unwrapped and wrapped his blanket again. "Not for the likes o' us," he repeated.

"Who's saying aught of the Cap'n?" roared Mat, bringing the cask to the deck with a thud. "Who's saying aught of the Cap'n?"

"Oh! no one, no one at all," said the shiverer, considerably startled. Then he added, as the big man slid back against the mast once more: "But if no one did--that's all right, ain't it? If no one did, I say."

Mat swore a round of obscene oaths under his breath and there was silence for a minute or two.

They were nearly at the end of the trip. Indeed, another two hours or so would see them safely at anchor in the safest of all smugglers' havens--the mouth of the River Blackwater, and their cargo easily and openly landed on Mersea Marsh Island.

The shivering little man smiled to himself at the thought of it. The warm kitchen at the Victory Inn, the smoking rum-cup, and the pleasant sallies of the fair Eliza appealed to his present mood, and he sniffled again and rearranged his blanket.

The green, white-splashed water lapped against the boat and a big saddle-backed gull flew over, screaming plaintively.

Mat began to talk again.

Blueneck interrupted sharply.

"Hush," he said. "No good ever comes of talking about Black'erchief Dick, whatever is said."

"Who said I was talking of the Cap'n?" said Mat quickly.

Blueneck looked uncomfortable, but he replied steadily: "Ah! Mat Turnby, you be careful!"

Mat laughed.

"I reckon you've got enough to do lookin' after yerself--wi'out worrying about me, master Spaniard," he said good-naturedly.

Blueneck shifted his position slightly.

"I reckon we git paid more than most sea-faring folk," he said.

Mat snorted.

"Oh, yes!" he growled, "paid! We're paid, all right, but how are we treated?"

Blueneck grinned.

"Like princes of the blood on the island," he laughed.

"The knife!"

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