We were none too soon. People had been reconnoitring us, the telegraph
had been at work, and we were not four hours at sea before we ran
against the gunboat that had been sent down the coast to look for us
and that would have caught us behind the island like a beast in a trap.
It was a night of driving cloud that gave intermittent gleams of
moonlight; the wind and sea were strong and we were rolling along
through a drift of rails and mist. Suddenly the world was white with
moonshine. The gunboat came out as a long dark shape wallowing on the
water to the east.
She sighted the _Maud Mary_ at once, and fired some sort of popgun to
arrest us.
The mate turned to me.
“Shall I tell the captain?”
“The captain be damned” said I, and we let him sleep through two hours
of chase till a rainstorm swallowed us up. Then we changed our course
and sailed right across them, and by morning only her smoke was
showing.
We were clear of Africa—and with the booty aboard I did not see what
stood between us and home.
For the first time since I had fallen sick in the Thames my spirits
rose. I was sea-sick and physically disgusted, of course, but I felt
kindly in spite of my qualms. So far as I could calculate then the
situation was saved. I saw myself returning triumphantly into the
Thames, and nothing on earth to prevent old Capern’s Perfect Filament
going on the market in fortnight. I had the monopoly of electric lamps
beneath my feet.
I was released from the spell of that bloodstained black body all mixed
up with grey-black mud. I was going back to baths and decent food and
aeronautics and Beatrice. I was going back to Beatrice and my real life
again—out of this well into which I had fallen. It would have needed
something more than sea-sickness and quap fever to prevent my spirits
rising.
I told the captain that I agreed with him that the British were the
scum of Europe, the westward drift of all the people, a disgusting
rabble, and I lost three pounds by attenuated retail to Pollack at
ha’penny nap and euchre.
And then you know, as we got out into the Atlantic this side of Cape
Verde, the ship began to go to pieces. I don’t pretend for one moment
to understand what happened. But I think Greiffenhagen’s recent work on
the effects of radium upon ligneous tissue does rather carry out my
idea that emanations from quap have rapid rotting effect upon woody
fibre.
From the first there had been a different feel about the ship, and as
the big winds and waves began to strain her she commenced leaking. Soon
she was leaking—not at any particular point, but everywhere. She did
not spring a leak, I mean, but water came in first of all near the
decaying edges of her planks, and then through them.
I firmly believe the water came through the wood. First it began to
ooze, then to trickle. It was like trying to carry moist sugar in a
thin paper bag. Soon we were taking in water as though we had opened a
door in her bottom.
Once it began, the thing went ahead beyond all fighting. For a day or
so we did our best, and I can still remember in my limbs and back the
pumping—the fatigue in my arms and the memory of a clear little dribble
of water that jerked as one pumped, and of knocking off and the being
awakened to go on again, and of fatigue piling up upon fatigue. At last
we ceased to think of anything but pumping; one became a thing of
torment enchanted, doomed to pump for ever. I still remember it as pure
relief when at last Pollack came to me pipe in mouth.
“The captain says the damned thing’s going down right now;” he
remarked, chewing his mouthpiece. “Eh?”
“Good idea!” I said. “One can’t go on pumping for ever.”
And without hurry or alacrity, sullenly and wearily we got into the
boats and pulled away from the _Maud Mary_ until we were clear of her,
and then we stayed resting on our oars, motionless upon a glassy sea,
waiting for her to sink. We were all silent, even the captain was
silent until she went down. And then he spoke quite mildly in an
undertone.
“Dat is the first ship I haf ever lost.... And it was not a fair game!
It wass not a cargo any man should take. No!”
I stared at the slow eddies that circled above the departed _Maud
Mary_, and the last chance of Business Organisations. I felt weary
beyond emotion. I thought of my heroics to Beatrice and my uncle, of my
prompt “_I’ll_ go,” and of all the ineffectual months I had spent after
this headlong decision. I was moved to laughter at myself and fate.
But the captain and the men did not laugh. The men scowled at me and
rubbed their sore and blistered hands, and set themselves to row....
As all the world knows we were picked up by the Union Castle liner,
_Portland Castle_.
The hairdresser aboard was a wonderful man, and he even improvised me a
dress suit, and produced a clean shirt and warm underclothing. I had a
hot bath, and dressed and dined and drank a bottle of Burgundy.
“Now,” I said, “are there any newspapers? I want to know what’s been
happening in the world.”
My steward gave me what he had, but I landed at Plymouth still largely
ignorant of the course of events. I shook off Pollack, and left the
captain and mate in an hotel, and the men in a Sailor’s Home until I
could send to pay them off, and I made my way to the station.
The newspapers I bought, the placards I saw, all England indeed
resounded to my uncle’s bankruptcy.
BOOK THE FOURTH
THE AFTERMATH OF TONO-BUNGAY
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE STICK OF THE ROCKET
I
That evening I talked with my uncle in the Hardingham for the last
time. The atmosphere of the place had altered quite shockingly. Instead
of the crowd of importunate courtiers there were just half a dozen
uninviting men, journalists waiting for an interview. Ropper the big
commissionaire was still there, but now indeed he was defending my
uncle from something more than time-wasting intrusions. I found the
little man alone in the inner office pretending to work, but really
brooding. He was looking yellow and deflated.
“Lord!” he said at the sight of me. “You’re lean, George. It makes that
scar of yours show up.”
We regarded each other gravely for a time.
“Quap,” I said, “is at the bottom of the Atlantic. There’s some
bills—We’ve got to pay the men.”
“Seen the papers?”
“Read ’em all in the train.”
“At bay,” he said. “I been at bay for a week.... Yelping round me....
And me facing the music. I’m feelin’ a bit tired.”
He blew and wiped his glasses.
“My stomack isn’t what it was,” he explained. “One finds it—these
times. How did it all happen, George? Your Marconigram—it took me in
the wind a bit.”
I told him concisely. He nodded to the paragraphs of my narrative and
at the end he poured something from a medicine bottle into a sticky
little wineglass and drank it. I became aware of the presence of drugs,
of three or four small bottles before him among his disorder of papers,
of a faint elusively familiar odour in the room.
“Yes,” he said, wiping his lips and recorking the bottle. “You’ve done
your best, George. The luck’s been against us.”
He reflected, bottle in hand. “Sometimes the luck goes with you and
sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it doesn’t. And then where are you?
Grass in the oven! Fight or no fight.”
He asked a few questions and then his thoughts came back to his own
urgent affairs. I tried to get some comprehensive account of the
situation from him, but he would not give it.
“Oh, I wish I’d had you. I wish I’d had you, George. I’ve had a lot on
my hands. You’re clear headed at times.”
“What has happened?”
“Oh! Boom!—infernal things.”
“Yes, but—how? I’m just off the sea, remember.”
“It’d worry me too much to tell you now. It’s tied up in a skein.”
He muttered something to himself and mused darkly, and roused himself
to say—
“Besides—you’d better keep out of it. It’s getting tight. Get ’em
talking. Go down to Crest Hill and fly. That’s _your_ affair.”
For a time his manner set free queer anxieties in my brain again.
I will confess that that Mordet Island nightmare of mine returned, and
as I looked at him his hand went out for the drug again. “Stomach,
George,” he said.
“I been fightin’ on that. Every man fights on some thing—gives way
somewheres—head, heart, liver—something. Zzzz. Gives way somewhere.
Napoleon did at last. All through the Waterloo campaign, his stomach—it
wasn’t a stomach! Worse than mine, no end.”
The mood of depression passed as the drug worked within him. His eyes
brightened. He began to talk big. He began to dress up the situation
for my eyes, to recover what he had admitted to me. He put it as a
retreat from Russia. There were still the chances of Leipzig.
“It’s a battle, George—a big fight. We’re fighting for millions. I’ve
still chances. There’s still a card or so. I can’t tell all my
plans—like speaking on the stroke.”
“You might,” I began.
“I can’t, George. It’s like asking to look at some embryo. You got to
wait. I know. In a sort of way, I know. But to tell it—No! You been
away so long. And everything’s got complicated.”
My perception of disastrous entanglements deepened with the rise of his
spirits. It was evident that I could only help to tie him up in
whatever net was weaving round his mind by forcing questions and
explanations upon him. My thoughts flew off at another angle. “How’s
Aunt Susan?” said I.
I had to repeat the question. His busy whispering lips stopped for a
moment, and he answered in the note of one who repeats a formula.
“She’d like to be in the battle with me. She’d like to be here in
London. But there’s corners I got to turn alone.” His eye rested for a
moment on the little bottle beside him. “And things have happened.
“You might go down now and talk to her,” he said, in a directer voice.
“I shall be down to-morrow night, I think.”
He looked up as though he hoped that would end our talk.
“For the week-end?” I asked.
“For the week-end. Thank God for week-ends, George!”