Some years ago I was running down this coast with many companions—too many for so small a craft. All was with us: an excellent wind, bright sun, and a clear air. I warned my companions about this mischievous patch (which is also haunted), and I said we would go right outside and cheat it. So we put the bow a point or two off the course we were making, so as to get right out into the open and leave the exasperation of Saint Alban’s inshore in the place to which his bad temper belongs. But not a bit of it. Even as we were looking landward, and laughing to see the tumble of water between us and the cliff, which tumble we thought to have thus escaped, even as we thought we had passed it, _the thing ran at us_.
It came on in a long line of white, just like a lot of dogs running up to play. It was abominably conscious and alive. It had said, ‘Here is a boat which thinks that, because it has gone outside, it can escape me,’ so it galloped up in a rush, and swarmed all around us, and we were in for an hour of it before we got to the regular water beyond.
I know a man who so dislikes this patch of curse upon the sea that he boasts of passing it as of a feat, though, in truth, there is no feat in it at all, but only an annoyance. So much did he pride himself upon the passage of it once that, in coming into harbour, and being asked to write something in the visiting book of the inn, he put down his name, and the date, and this poem:
‘I made my passage through Saint Alban’s Race And came to anchor in this bloody place.’
The person who owned the inn was very angry on seeing this poem, and asked that it might be rubbed out. This the man of whom I speak very humbly did, and substituted for the offensive couplet a long, long poem in the heroic style, all in rhyming decasyllabic couplets, and iambic at that, which poem is to be read there to this day.
You gentlemen of England—if gentlemen I may still call you—who travel about in mechanical ships as big as a street of houses, know nothing of these things.
But I will tell you one last thing about Saint Alban’s Race. I have said that it is haunted. Well, what do you think of this? As I was passing there once, there came up to me, catching me up, at a pace far faster than the dear Nona could ever sail, such a fine rich little boat, with canvas so new and so tight, and so white, and painted and enamelled, and gear well trammelled, and the brasswork shining like the sun, and the cordage new, and varnish upon all the combings, and on the tiller, and at her helm a man dressed as though for Cowes Week in opéra bouffe. She foamed, and was running past in a streak. The day was bright, well past its noon, and the shores of England stood clear all abeam. There was the Wight, with its brilliant chalk cliffs taking the sunlight, and there, very clear, the Hampshire coast, and right at hand, Purbeck: all as neat as a picture. But the man in the exhibition-shop-window boat hailed me, and shouted through a horn, pointing fiercely eastward, as he stood up and steered with his knee, ‘Are those the Needles?’
Now what could such a portent mean? What was the explanation of that mystery? The sea brings all adventures, but what adventure was this? Whence did this man come? How could any man so lay a course from the Bill eastward without knowing what the Needles were, and without recognising them when he saw them? It is true we were end on; but they are the most conspicuous rocks, by their shape, in all the Channel, and they are as familiar as Piccadilly. Even a man who had never seen them must know by his chart where they lay, and by the obvious, unmistakable, glaring white point of the Island. To ask ‘Are those the Needles?’ was like asking ‘Is that the Eddystone?’ when one had been sailing with a good breeze southward from Plymouth, and perceived a tall tower standing up utterly alone in the midst of the seas, very far from land. This man could not have crossed the Atlantic (though men have done so in boats no larger), for she was spick and span. And even had he crossed the Atlantic, he would have a chart. Was he, perhaps, a Western man, who had lived all his life as in Devon or Cornwall, and had set out thus in middle age to explore the strange Eastern people beyond Portland Bill?
There may be some few such remaining who wisely root themselves in their native place, and such a man might for so short a course take no chart—in which case he would have only himself to blame for running through the Shambles, and drowning if God so willed. At any rate, there he was, asking poignantly whether, indeed, those were the Needles.
For a moment I hesitated whether I should not tell him it was the Old Man of Hoy or the Giant’s Causeway, but the spirit of truth entered into me, and I answered, ‘Yes.’
He remains a problem, and to me, therefore, fascinating; for there is nothing so holds the mind—my mind at least—as a problem connected with reality. I know that many men get an equal pleasure out of problems set them in fiction; that is why a good detective story very properly commands a large sale, especially among the intelligent: that is why a good detective story is bought by men as well as by women, whereas your ordinary best-seller, so full of what they call ‘psychology,’ is fed to the other sex, not mine. Bismarck also, intelligent among the Germans, delighted in the detective stories of fiction; but, for my part, though I take pleasure in them also (especially when they are of first-rate construction and diction, like ‘Trent’s Last Case,’ Mr. Bentley’s book, which is, without a doubt, the best detective story in English to-day), yet it is a pale pursuit compared with problems set in the midst of reality: it is all the difference between dreaming and doing. Moreover, the wretched writing man can never forget that a story written is at the author’s pleasure. That author knew the solution from the beginning—as is proper to a creator—and as we read we know that he can make the evidence fit any way he chose. But when you are dealing with reality, the evidence upon either side of the problem is not made to fit any end. You have to reconcile as best you can two opposite sets of equally certain things, which seem the one set to contradict the other. If the problem as to who that Needles man was, and where he had come from, had involved great issues, racial hatreds, the fate of a fortune, or the destiny of a realm, it would have become an historical problem; and historical problems are the most fascinating of all.
There come first in order those involving human motive, and the known probabilities of human action. Take three of them. The affair of the Diamond Necklace, the Tichborne case, and the Dreyfus case. In each of these the difficulty of finding the solution lies in the discovery of motive, and in the estimate of truth proceeding from a group of witnesses, or sometimes from only one witness, and in each of these there is an opposing set of accounts, and of depositions contradictory the one to the other.
In the affair of the Diamond Necklace, you have either to believe that a man, living in the heart of the court life of Versailles, accepted a ludicrous signature as that of the Queen; or else you have to believe that about twenty people, who had no connection one with the other, and were separated by every conceivable kind of social circumstance, place and time, conspired to tell unshaken the same lie. If you ask whether a man living in the heart of the rich society of London would accept as normal the signature ‘The Hon. Henry Hound, Esq.’ at the end of a letter (he having known for many years the said Henry Hound, let alone the fantastic nature of such a signature) you would certainly say that the thing was morally impossible. But what if you had to decide between such a moral impossibility and the necessity of believing that a railway porter at North Berwick, a small farmer in County Clare, a dilettante friend of the said Henry Hound, and Henry Hound himself, and a chance taxi-man who had once driven him, and a policeman who had noted the taxi go by, and about a dozen others equally separate, did all swear and remain unshaken under examination, and after a long process of time, to testimonies which, combined, made the conclusion inevitable that this man, accustomed to all our social usages, and living in the heart of our rich society, did regard such an absurd signature as normal?
The Tichborne case depends upon contradictions in which I have little reading; but, if I remember right, the main contrast in it lay between two sets of undoubted facts. On the one hand, a man’s mother recognised him; his distinguished advocate preferred ruin to the concealment of his own passionate conviction of the man’s identity—and, after seeing all the evidence, and hearing everything in confidence, deliberately broke the most sacred rules of his lawyers’ trade union, inviting certain disaster in order to leave conviction to posterity. As against a set of things like that you had the unaccountable ignorance of a man of middle age upon habits and words, and the rest, in which his youth must have been steeped, and many other contradictory points as well. There has been formed a comfortable legend upon this particular problem: a legend which affirms the certain justice of the verdict.