I took it up and read:
"Motor smash compound fracture of the leg gordon nasmyth what price mordet now"
For a moment neither of us spoke.
"That"s all right," I said at last.
"Eh?" said my uncle.
"I"M going. I"ll get that quap or bust."
II
I had a ridiculous persuasion that I was "saving the situation."
"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 n.o.body 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 Ess.e.x man of impenetrable reserve. The crew were astoundingly ill-clad and dest.i.tute 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 quant.i.ty 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 c.o.c.kroaches 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?"
I turned over the pages without any effect on her playing.
"When?" I asked.
She dealt in chords. "I wish I COULD play this!" she said. "Midnight."
She gave her attention to the music for a time.
"You may have to wait."
"I"ll wait."
She brought her playing to an end by--as school boys say--"stashing it up."
"I can"t play to-night," she said, standing up and meeting my eyes. "I wanted to give you a parting voluntary."
"Was that Wagner, Beatrice?" asked Lady Osprey looking up from her cards. "It sounded very confused."