Swirling Waters Part 7

The world he looked upon breathed in money through eager nostrils.

Money was the oxygen of civilization. Without money a man slowly asphyxiated. It must be every man's ambition to own big money--to breathe it in himself with full-lunged, l.u.s.tful, intoxicating gulps, and to dole it out as master to dependents pleading for their ration of life. That was the meaning of power: to give or withhold the essentials of life at one's pleasure.

Consequently he had failed to read the riddle of Matheson's motive at that crucial interview in the financier's office on the Rue Laffitte. He had failed to realize that a man might be as eager to give as to grasp.

He had failed to reckon on altruism as a possible dominating factor in the decisions of a successful man of business.

Further than that, it lay entirely outside Lars Larssen's plane of thought that a man who had fought his way up to worldly success from a clerk's stool in a Montreal broker's office, who had made himself a power in the world of London and Paris finance, could voluntarily give up money and power and bury himself in obscurity.

Larssen judged that Matheson had been murdered and robbed by the _apaches_. It was possible, though extremely improbable, that he might have committed suicide. Which it was, mattered nothing to the s.h.i.+powner.

But he did not dream for one instant that Matheson might have thrown up place and power to disappear into voluntary exile.

Clifford Matheson had set himself from the age of eighteen to achieve a money success. At thirty-seven, he had achieved it. He had slashed out for himself a path to power in the financial world. He was rich enough to satisfy the desires of most men.

Five years ago he had married into a well-known English family, and the doors of society had been opened wide to him. But his marriage had been a ghastly mistake. Olive, after marriage, had showed herself entirely out of sympathy with the idealism that formed so large a part of the complex character of her husband. She wanted money and power, and she drove spurs into her husband that he might obtain for her more and more money, more and more power. Any other ambition in Clifford she tried to sneer down with the ruthlessness of an utterly mercenary woman.

He had come to loathe the sensuous artificiality of his life. He had come to loathe the ruthless selfishness of finance. He was sick with the callousness of that stratum of the world in which he moved.

In the last couple of years he had found himself drawn powerfully towards the calm, pa.s.sionless atmosphere of science in which his elder brother, John Riviere, had found his life-work. Riviere had made no worldly success for himself. The scientific researches he had undertaken made no stir when they found light in the pages of obscure quarterlies circulating amongst a few dozen other men engaged in similar research.

Riviere had not the temperament to push himself or the children of his brain. He had settled into a solitary bachelor life in a small Canadian college--an unknown, unrecognized man--and yet the calm, steady purpose and the calm, pa.s.sionless happiness of the life had made a deep impression on Clifford Matheson.

Riviere had come to an accidental death on a holiday with his brother in the wilds of northern Canada. Few knew of it beyond Matheson.

The financier had been drawn towards one special problem of science, and on this he had studied deeply the last few years. From his studies, an idea had developed which could only be worked out by experiments. Many years of patient research would be needed, for this thought-child of Matheson's was a master-idea, an idea which meant the exploring of a practically uncharted sea of knowledge.

In brief, it was an attack of root-problem of human disease. Doctors and pathologists had hitherto been viewing disease from the aspect of its myriad effects on the highly complex human being. It was as though one were to attempt to understand the subtleties of some full-grown language without first learning its elementary grammar--the foundations on which its super-structure is reared.

Now Matheson, coming to the problem with a strong, fresh mind unhampered by the swaddling clothes of a college training, saw it from a view-point entirely different to that of the doctors. He wanted to know the elementary grammar of human disease. He found that no book dealt with it--nor attempted to deal with it. No recognized department of a medical course took as its province the root-causes of disease. Pathology was a study of effects. Bacteriology--that again was merely a study of effects.

He had read widely amongst a variety of scientific research-matter, and had found that here and there an isolated attack was being made on the problem of causes. But nothing strong-planned--as any one of his financial schemes would be planned--nothing co-ordinated. The researches of the day were starting at points too complex, before the basic conditions of the problem were known.

He wanted to learn, and to give to the world, the basic facts.

Disease, as he viewed it, was primarily the result of abnormal conditions of living. His idea was to study it in its simplest possible form. To study the effects of abnormal conditions of life on the lowest living organisms--the microscopic blobs of life whose structure is elemental. From his wide reading of the last couple of years, he knew what little was already known and the vast field that was unexplored territory. He need not waste time over what others had already dealt with--the new territory offered sufficient field for a life-work.

Once he could get at the basic facts of disease as it related to the very simplest organisms, he could progress upwards to the higher organisms, and so eventually to man. What could be learnt from the pathological condition of an amoeba might lay the foundations for the conquering of cancer in man, and a hundred other diseases as well.

Matheson's idea was a revolutionary one--a master-idea like a master-patent. It held limitless possibilities for the alleviation of human pain and suffering.

It was an idea to which a man might well devote his whole intellect and energies.

Some months before, the financier had bought, in the name of John Riviere, a tumbledown villa on the outskirts of Neuilly. In it he had fitted up a research laboratory in which to pursue the experimental end of the problem which had such vital interest for him.

A high wall surrounded a garden overgrown with weeds and a villa falling to decay. At one time, no doubt, the house had formed a nest for the _pet.i.te amie_ of some rich Parisian, but now the owner of the property was only too glad to sell it at any price, and without asking any but the most perfunctory questions of the man who had offered to buy. In the solitude of the ruined villa, Matheson had been pursuing his scientific research at such times as he could s.n.a.t.c.h from his financial business.

He had been leading a "double life"--from a motive far different to the double life of other married men. There was no woman in the case. There was no secret scheme of money-making. There was no solitary pandering to the senses with drink or drugs.

But the financier had been finding that the leading of a double life bristled with practical difficulties. Apart from the calls of his business, there were the insistent demands of his wife. The position was becoming an intolerable one. He had to choose between the life of the money-maker or that of the creator of a new field of knowledge.

On the night of 14th March the conversation on the platform of the Gare de Lyon and the fight with Lars Larssen had brought the question of decision to a head. He had grappled with it in his office, pacing to and fro long after the s.h.i.+powner had left. He had turned his steps towards the heights of Montmartre so that he might carry his problem up to the solitude of a high place, in the peace of the eternal stars.

He was deep in the question of decision when the two apaches had attacked him in the narrow lane leading to the Basilique of the Sacred Heart. Matheson was a man of considerable strength and alertness. He had felled one of the two _apaches_ with his heavy gold-mounted stick; the other one had sent through the fur-lined coat a knife-thrust which had grazed his ribs. Matheson had beaten him off, and had then continued his path to the Basilique.

But the attack had brought a vivid inspiration for the solution of his personal problem.

He would slip off the personality of Clifford Matheson and take up completely that of John Riviere. He would leave his overcoat and stick by the riverside at Neuilly, and 'phone information about them to the police or to a newspaper. That knife-slit in his overcoat would be taken as evidence of murder. They would judge him murdered, with robbery as motive. The courts would give leave for Olive to presume death. She would be freed; she would come into her husband's fortune; she could marry again if she chose to.

Surely that was the solution of his personal problem!

For his part he could live his life unshackled, and there was sufficient money already standing in the name of Riviere at a Paris bank to give him a modest income on which to keep himself and pay for the materials of research.

No one would be the worse for his disappearance; his wife would be the gainer; and mankind, he hoped, would be the gainer through the research to which he could henceforth devote his life.

Yes, that was a.s.suredly _the_ solution.

CHAPTER VII

A SEAT BY THE ARENA

Riviere had bought fresh clothes and other necessities at the suburban shops of Neuilly. He had shaved off his moustache; arranged his hair differently; put on a new shape of collar. It is curious how the shape of a collar is a.s.sociated in most minds with the impression of a man's features. To change into another shape is to make a very noticeable difference to one's appearance.

He had also bought travelling necessities. His intention was to wander for a couple of months. It would help him to clear his brain from the tangle of financial matters which still obsessed it against his will. He wanted to sweep out the Hudson Bay scheme, Lars Larssen, Olive, and many other matters from the living-room of his mind. He wanted a couple of months in which to settle himself in the new personality; plan out his future work in detail; set the mental fly-wheel turning, so as to concentrate his energies undividedly on the work to come.

In the afternoon, old Mme Dromet entered the villa to scrub and clean.

She had a standing arrangement to come two or three afternoons a week.

"Are you going away from Paris?" shouted old Mme Dromet to her employer, seeing the portmanteau and the other signs of departure. She was stone-deaf, and in the manner of deaf people always shouted what she had to say.

Riviere nodded a.s.sent, and produced a paper of written instructions.

These he read through with her, so as to make sure that she thoroughly understood. Then he gave her a generous allowance to cover the next few months.

Later in the afternoon, he was seated with his modest travelling equipment in a cab, driving to No. 8, Rue Laffitte. He mounted to the offices of the financier and, in order to test the efficacy of his changed appearance, asked to see Mr Clifford Matheson.

For a moment the clerk stared at the visitor. The resemblance to his employer was certainly very striking. Yet there were differences. Mr Matheson wore a close-cut moustache, while this man was clean-shaven.

The commanding look, the hard-set mask of the financier were softened away; there was joy of life, there was freedom of soul in the features and in the att.i.tude of this visitor.

"I am Mr John Riviere, his half-brother. Will you tell him that I am here?"

The clerk felt somehow relieved. That of course explained the striking resemblance. He replied: "Mr Matheson has not been at the office to-day, sir. I fancy he has left for Monte Carlo. I am not sure, but I believe that was his intention."

"Has he left no message for me?"

"I will see, sir. Please take a seat."