"Perhaps I did," said he, with his steady eyes fixed on her. "But I remember "em now. Would you like to go back?"
She put her hands for a few seconds before her face, as though to hide swift visions of slaughtered enemies, then dashed them away. "No. Not now. Not after--No. But mountains, freedom--anything unlike prison. Oh, I"ve gone mad sometimes. I"ve wanted to take up a fender and smash things."
"I"ve felt like that myself," said Jaffery.
"And what have you done?"
"I"ve broken out of prison and run away."
"That"s what I did," said Liosha.
Then Jaffery burst into his great laugh and held her hands and looked at her with kindly, sympathetic mirth in his eyes. And Liosha laughed, too.
"We"re both of us savages under our skins, old lady. That"s what it comes to."
No more was said of Ras Fendihook. The man"s broad, flashy good-humour had caught her fancy; his vagabond life stimulated her imagination of wider horizons; he promised her release from the conventions and restrictions of her artificial existence; she was ready to embark with him, as his wife, into the Unknown; but it was evident that she had not given him the tiniest little sc.r.a.p of her heart.
"Why didn"t you tell me all this long ago?" asked Jaffery.
"I tried to be good to please you--you and Barbara and Hilary, who"ve been so kind to me."
"It"s all this infernal civilisation," he declared. "My dear girl, I"m as much fed up with it as you are; I want to go somewhere and wear beads."
"So do I," said Liosha.
I thought of Barbara"s lecture on the whole duty of woman and I chuckled. The att.i.tude in which I was, my hands clasped round my knees, consorted with sardonic merriment. I was checked, however, a moment afterwards, by the sight of my barbarians in the perfect agreement of babyhood calmly walking away from me along the cliff road. I jumped to my feet and pursued them.
"At any rate while you"re with me," I panted, "you"ll observe the decencies of civilised life."
CHAPTER XIX
"_Arretez! "Arretez!_" roared Jaffery all of a sudden.
We had just pa.s.sed the Havre Casino on our way back from Etretat. The chauffeur pulled up. Jaffery flung open the door, leaped out and disappeared. In a few seconds we heard his voice reverberating from side to side of the Boulevard Maritime.
"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"
I raised myself and, looking over the back of the car, saw Jaffery in characteristic att.i.tude, shaking a strange man by the shoulders and laughing in delighted welcome. He was a squat, broad, powerful-looking fellow, with a heavy black beard trimmed to a point, and wearing a curiously ill-fitting suit of tweeds and a bowler-hat. I noticed that he carried neither stick nor gloves. The ecstasies of encounter having subsided, Jaffery dragged him to the car.
"This is my good old friend, Captain Maturin," he shouted, opening the door. "Mrs. Prescott. Mr. Freeth. Get in. We"ll have a drink at Tortoni"s."
Captain Maturin, unconfused by Jaffery"s unceremonious whirling, took off his hat very politely and entered the car in a grave, self-possessed manner. He had clear, unblinking, grey-green eyes, the colour of a stormy sea before the dawn. I was for surrendering him my seat next Liosha, but with a courteous "Pray don"t," he quickly established himself on the small seat facing us, hitherto occupied by Jaffery.
Jaffery jumped up in front next the chauffeur and leaned over the part.i.tion. The car started.
"Captain and I are old shipmates." All Havre must have heard him. "From Christiania to Odessa, with all the Baltic and Mediterranean ports thrown in. In the depth of winter. Remember?"
"It was five years ago," said Captain Maturin, twisting his head round.
"We sailed from the port of Leith on the 27th of December."
"And by gosh! Didn"t it blow? Gales the whole time, there and back."
"It was as dirty a voyage as ever I made," said Captain Maturin.
"A ripping time, anyhow," said Jaffery.
"Weren"t you very seasick?" I asked.
"Ho! ho! ho!" Jaffery roared derisively.
"Mr. Chayne"s pretty tough, sir," said the Captain with a grave smile.
"He has missed his vocation. He"s a good sailor lost."
"Remember that night off Vigo?"
"I don"t ever want to see such another, Mr. Chayne. It was touch and go." Captain Maturin"s smile faded. No commander likes to think of the time when a freakish Providence and not his helpless self was responsible for the saving of his ship.
"He was on the bridge sixty hours at a stretch," said Jaffery.
"Sixty hours?" I exclaimed.
"Thousands have done it before and thousands have done it since, myself included. On this occasion Mr. Chayne saw it through with me."
Two days and nights and a day without sleep; standing on a few planks, holding on to a rail, while you are tossed up and down and from side to side and drenched with dashing tons of ice-cold water and fronting a hurricane that blows ice-tipped arrows, and all the time not knowing from one minute to the next whether you are going to Kingdom come--No.
It is my idea of duty, but not my idea of fun. And even as duty--I thanked merciful Heaven that never since the age of nine, when I was violently sick crossing to the Isle of Wight, have I had the remotest desire to be a mariner, either professional or amateur. I looked at the two adventurers wonderingly; and so did Liosha.
"I love the sea," she said. "Don"t you?"
"I can"t say I do, ma"am. I"ve got a wife and child at Pinner, and I grow sweet peas for exhibition. All of which I can"t attend to on board ship."
He said it very seriously. He was not the man to talk flippantly for the entertainment of a pretty woman.
"But if he"s a month ash.o.r.e, he fumes to get back," boomed Jaffery.
"It"s the work I was bred to," replied the Captain soberly. "If a man doesn"t love his work, he"s not worth his salt. But that"s not saying that I love the sea."
With such discourse did we beguile the short journey to the Hotel, Restaurant and Cafe Tortoni in the Place Gambetta. The terrace was thronged with the good Havre folks, husbands and wives and families enjoying the Sunday afternoon _aperitif_.
"Now let us have a drink," cried Jaffery, huge pioneer through the crowd. Liosha would have left us three men to our masculine devices. But Jaffery swept her along. Why shouldn"t we have a pretty woman at our table as well as other people? She flushed at the compliment, the first, I think, he had ever paid her. A waiter conjured a vacant table and chairs from nowhere, in the midst of the sedentary throng. For Liosha was brought grenadine syrup and soda, for me absinthe, at which Captain Maturin, with the steady English sailor"s suspicion of any other drink than Scotch whisky, glanced disapprovingly. Jaffery, to give himself an appet.i.te for dinner, ordered half a litre of Munich beer.
"And now, Captain," said he genially, "what have you been doing with yourself? Still on the Baltic-Mediterranean?"
"No, Mr. Chayne. I left that some time ago. I"m on the Blue Cross Line--Ellershaw & Co.--trading between Havre and Mozambique."
"Where"s Mozambique?" Liosha asked me.