‘Your brother Brian must have been a fine big boy,’ I said. ‘Now about how old would he have been when he passed away? Twelve?’
‘Thirteen and a quarter,’ said Titania. ‘He was teaching me how to spit.’
‘And so he passed away, and I’m very sorry to hear it,’ I said. ‘… And your Auntie Lily wouldn’t let you go to the pictures, would she? Well, you must always obey your elders, as you are told in the Catechism. Who did you like best on the pictures?’
Her face sort of lit up, then, d’you see? She told me: ‘Best of all I liked Pearl White in a serial, Peg o’ the Ring. Oh, it was good! And John Bunny and Flora Finch——’ She giggled at the memory. ‘But we had only got to Part Three of The Clutching Hand, when Mummy and Brian died, and I went to live with Auntie Lily…. Apart from the danger of fire, picture palaces are unhealthy because they are full of microbes. Microbes carry germs…. Auntie Lily used to wear an Influenza Mask on her face when she went out – you know, you can’t be too careful these days,’ said this serious little girl.
‘And kept all her windows locked up, too, I dare say,’ I said. ‘Well, your elders and betters know best, no doubt…. But I mean to say, what did you do with yourself? Play with dolls?’
‘Sometimes. Or, sometimes, I did sewing, or read books.’
‘Ah, you’re a great one for reading, Titania,’ I said, ‘like your poor mother used to be. Why, Titania is a name out of a fairy story, isn’t it? A clever girl like you could read anything she could get her hands on, if she were locked up with nobody to talk to. I bet you read your poor brother’s old books, too. I remember noticing on the mantelpiece a bound volume of the Boy’s Own Paper. And also … now let me see … a book with a black and yellow cover entitled One Thousand Things a Clever Boy Can Do – is that it?’
She said: ‘Not Things! Tricks.’
‘And right you are! One Thousand Tricks a Clever Boy Can Do. And I’ll bet you mastered them all, didn’t you?’
She said: ‘Not all of them. I didn’t have the right things to do most of them with——’
‘There’s one trick in that book, which I have read myself,’ I said, ‘which you did master, though, and which you did have the right apparatus for, Titania, my dear. Tell you what it is. You get a medium needle and stick it down the centre of a soft cork. Then you get a penny and place this penny between two little blocks of wood. Put your cork with the needle in it on top of the penny, and strike the cork a sharp blow with a hammer. The cork will hold the needle straight, so that it goes right through that penny. That’s the way you killed your poor Auntie Lily, isn’t it, Titania?’
Finishing the last of her meringue, she nodded. Having swallowed, she said, ‘Yes,’ and, to my horror, she giggled.
‘Why, then,’ I said, ‘you must come back to London with me, d’you see, and tell my Inspector all about it.’
‘Yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘Only you mustn’t say anything to Auntie Edith.’
I told her: ‘Nobody will do anything dreadful to you; only you must confess and get it off your poor little mind.’
Titania’s second cousin Edith, by courtesy called ‘Auntie’, came with the child and me to London … and there, in the police station, she flatly denied every word of everything, and cried to be sent home.
Put yourself in my position, stigmatised as a madman and a brute! I lost my temper, one word led to another, and I ‘tendered my resignation’….
I shall never forget the sly expression on the girl Titania’s face when she went back with her Auntie Edith to Luton.
I have no idea what has happened to her since. She will be about thirty-eight or thirty-nine by now, and I should not be at all surprised if she had turned out to be quite a handful.
The Queen of Pig Island
THE story of the Baroness von Wagner, that came to its sordid and bloody end after she, with certain others, had tried to make an earthly paradise on a desert island, was so fantastic that if it had not first been published as news, even the editors of the sensational crime-magazines would have thought twice before publishing it.
Yet the von Wagner Case is commonplace, considered in relation to the Case of the Skeletons on Porcosito, or ‘Pig Island’, as it is commonly called.
The bones in themselves are component parts of a nightmare. Their history, as it was found, written on mutilated paper in Lalouette’s waterproof grouch-bag, is such that no one has yet dared to print it, although it happens to be true.
In case you are unacquainted with the old slang of the road: a Grouch-Bag is a little pouch that used to hang about the necks of circus performers. It held their savings, and was tied with a gathered string, like the old-fashioned Dorothy-Bag. This was necessary, because circus-encampments used to be hotbeds of petty larceny. So, on the high trapeze, the double-back-somersault man wore his grouch-bag. The lion-tamer in the cage of the big cats might forget his whip or lose his nerve – he would never forget or lose his grouch-bag, out of which could be filched the little moist roll of paper-money that was all he had to show for his constantly imperilled life.
Lalouette carried her grouch-bag long after the gulls had picked her clean. It contained 6,700 dollars and a wad of paper with a scribbled story, which I propose to make public here.
It is at once the most terrible and the most pathetic story I have ever had to tell.
At first the captain of the ship who landed on Porcosito, who subscribed to a Popular Science magazine, thought he had discovered the Missing Link – the creature that was neither man nor ape. The first skeleton he found had a sub-human appearance. The thorax was capacious enough to contain a small barrel; the arms were remarkably long, and the legs little and crooked. The bones of the hands, the feet, and the jaw were prodigiously strong and thick. But then, not far away – it is only a little island – in a clump of bushes, he found another skeleton, of a man who, when he was alive, could not have been more than two feet tall.
There were other bones: bones of pigs, birds, and fishes; and also the scattered bones of another man who must have been no taller than the other little man. These bones were smashed to pieces and strewn over an area of several square yards. Wildly excited, happy as a schoolboy reading a mystery story, the captain (his name was Oxford) went deeper, into the more sheltered part of Porcosito, where a high hump or rock rises in the form of a hog’s back and shelters a little hollow place from the wind that blows off the sea. There he found the ruins of a crude hut.
The roof, which must have been made of grass, or light canes, had disappeared. The birds had come in and pecked clean the white bones of a woman. Most of her hair was still there, caught in a crack into which the wind had blown it or the draught had pulled it. It was long and fair hair. The leather grouch-bag, which had hung about her neck, was lying on the floor in the region of the lower vertebræ, which were scattered like thrown dice. This human skeleton had no arms and no legs. Captain Oxford had the four sets of bones packed into separate boxes, and wrote in his log a minute account of his exploration of the tiny island of Porcosito. He believed that he had discovered something unexplainable.
He was disappointed.
The underwriters of Lloyd’s in London, had, with their usual punctiliousness, paid the many thousands of pounds for which the steamship Anna Maria had been insured, after she went down near Pig Island, as sailors called the place. The Anna Maria had gone down with all hands in a hurricane. The captain, officers, passengers, cargo and crew had been written off as lost. Faragut’s Circus was on board, travelling to Mexico.