“I’m going,” I said quite consciously and dramatically. I saw the whole
affair—how shall I put it?—in American colours.
I sat down beside him. “Give me all the data you’ve got,” I said, “and
I’ll pull this thing off.”
“But nobody knows exactly where—”
“Nasmyth does, and he’ll tell me.”
“He’s been very close,” said my uncle, and regarded me.
“He’ll tell me all right, now he’s smashed.”
He thought. “I believe he will.”
“George,” he said, “if you pull this thing off—Once or twice before
you’ve stepped in—with that sort of Woosh of yours—”
He left the sentence unfinished.
“Give me that note-book,” I said, “and tell me all you know. Where’s
the ship? Where’s Pollack? And where’s that telegram from? If that
quap’s to be got, I’ll get it or bust. If you’ll hold on here until I
get back with it.”...
And so it was I jumped into the wildest adventure of my life.
I requisitioned my uncle’s best car forthwith. I went down that night
to the place of despatch named on Nasmyth’s telegram, Bampton S.O.
Oxon, routed him out with a little trouble from that centre, made
things right with him and got his explicit directions; and I was
inspecting the _Maud Mary_ with young Pollack, his cousin and aide, the
following afternoon. She was rather a shock to me and not at all in my
style, a beast of a brig inured to the potato trade, and she reeked
from end to end with the faint, subtle smell of raw potatoes so that it
prevailed even over the temporary smell of new paint. She was a beast
of a brig, all hold and dirty framework, and they had ballasted her
with old iron and old rails and iron sleepers, and got a miscellaneous
lot of spades and iron wheelbarrows against the loading of the quap. I
thought her over with Pollack, one of those tall blond young men who
smoke pipes and don’t help much, and then by myself, and as a result I
did my best to sweep Gravesend clean of wheeling planks, and got in as
much cord and small rope as I could for lashing. I had an idea we might
need to run up a jetty. In addition to much ballast she held, remotely
hidden in a sort of inadvertent way a certain number of ambiguous cases
which I didn’t examine, but which I gathered were a provision against
the need of a trade.
The captain was a most extraordinary creature, under the impression we
were after copper ore; he was a Roumanian Jew, with twitching,
excitable features, who had made his way to a certificate after some
preliminary naval experiences in the Black Sea. The mate was an Essex
man of impenetrable reserve. The crew were astoundingly ill-clad and
destitute and dirty; most of them youths, unwashed, out of colliers.
One, the cook was a mulatto; and one, the best-built fellow of them
all, was a Breton. There was some subterfuge about our position on
board—I forget the particulars now—I was called the supercargo and
Pollack was the steward. This added to the piratical flavour that
insufficient funds and Gordon-Nasmyth’s original genius had already
given the enterprise.
Those two days of bustle at Gravesend, under dingy skies, in narrow,
dirty streets, were a new experience for me. It is like nothing else in
my life. I realised that I was a modern and a civilised man. I found
the food filthy and the coffee horrible; the whole town stank in my
nostrils, the landlord of the Good Intent on the quay had a stand-up
quarrel with us before I could get even a hot bath, and the bedroom I
slept in was infested by a quantity of exotic but voracious flat
parasites called locally “bugs,” in the walls, in the woodwork,
everywhere. I fought them with insect powder, and found them comatose
in the morning. I was dipping down into the dingy underworld of the
contemporary state, and I liked it no better than I did my first dip
into it when I stayed with my Uncle Nicodemus Frapp at the bakery at
Chatham—where, by-the-by, we had to deal with cockroaches of a smaller,
darker variety, and also with bugs of sorts.
Let me confess that through all this time before we started I was
immensely self-conscious, and that Beatrice played the part of audience
in my imagination throughout. I was, as I say, “saving the situation,”
and I was acutely aware of that. The evening before we sailed, instead
of revising our medicine-chest as I had intended, I took the car and
ran across country to Lady Grove to tell my aunt of the journey I was
making, dress, and astonish Lady Osprey by an after dinner call.
The two ladies were at home and alone beside a big fire that seemed
wonderfully cheerful after the winter night. I remember the effect of
the little parlour in which they sat as very bright and domestic. Lady
Osprey, in a costume of mauve and lace, sat on a chintz sofa and played
an elaborately spread-out patience by the light of a tall shaded lamp;
Beatrice, in a whiteness that showed her throat, smoked a cigarette in
an armchair and read with a lamp at her elbow. The room was
white-panelled and chintz-curtained. About those two bright centres of
light were warm dark shadow, in which a circular mirror shone like a
pool of brown water. I carried off my raid by behaving like a slave of
etiquette. There were moments when I think I really made Lady Osprey
believe that my call was an unavoidable necessity, that it would have
been negligent of me not to call just how and when I did. But at the
best those were transitory moments.
They received me with disciplined amazement. Lady Osprey was interested
in my face and scrutinised the scar. Beatrice stood behind her
solicitude. Our eyes met, and in hers I could see startled
interrogations.
“I’m going,” I said, “to the west coast of Africa.”
They asked questions, but it suited my mood to be vague.
“We’ve interests there. It is urgent I should go. I don’t know when I
may return.”
After that I perceived Beatrice surveyed me steadily.
The conversation was rather difficult. I embarked upon lengthy thanks
for their kindness to me after my accident. I tried to understand Lady
Osprey’s game of patience, but it didn’t appear that Lady Osprey was
anxious for me to understand her patience. I came to the verge of
taking my leave.
“You needn’t go yet,” said Beatrice, abruptly.
She walked across to the piano, took a pile of music from the cabinet
near, surveyed Lady Osprey’s back, and with a gesture to me dropped it
all deliberately on to the floor.
“Must talk,” she said, kneeling close to me as I helped her to pick it
up. “Turn my pages. At the piano.”
“I can’t read music.”
“Turn my pages.”
Presently we were at the piano, and Beatrice was playing with noisy
inaccuracy. She glanced over her shoulder and Lady Osprey had resumed
her patience. The old lady was very pink, and appeared to be absorbed
in some attempt to cheat herself without our observing it.
“Isn’t West Africa a vile climate?” “Are you going to live there?” “Why
are you going?”
Beatrice asked these questions in a low voice and gave me no chance to
answer. Then taking a rhythm from the music before her, she said—
“At the back of the house is a garden—a door in the wall—on the lane.
Understand?”