The complete works, p.189
The Complete Works, page 189
I had the mood of grave concentration of a boy who has lapsed into poaching. And the business only began to assume proper proportions for me as I got near the ship, to seem any other kind of thing than the killing of a bird or rabbit.
In the night, however, it took on enormous and portentous forms. "By God!" I cried suddenly, starting wide awake; "but it was murder!"
I lay after that wide awake, staring at my memories. In some odd way these visions mixed up with my dream of in my uncle in his despair. The black body which saw now damaged and partly buried, but which, nevertheless, I no longer felt was dead but acutely alive and perceiving, I mixed up with the ochreous slash under my uncle's face. I tried to dismiss this horrible obsession from my mind, but it prevailed over all my efforts.
The next day was utterly black with my sense of that ugly creature's body. I am the least superstitious of men, but it drew me. It drew me back into those thickets to the very place where I had hidden him.
Some evil and detestable beast had been at him, and he lay disinterred.
Methodically I buried his swollen and mangled carcass again, and returned to the ship for another night of dreams. Next day for all the morning I resisted the impulse to go to him, and played nap with Pollack with my secret gnawing at me, and in the evening started to go and was near benighted. I never told a soul of them of this thing I had done.
Next day I went early, and he had gone, and there were human footmarks and ugly stains round the muddy hole from which he had been dragged.
I returned to the ship, disconcerted and perplexed. That day it was the men came aft, with blistered hands and faces, and sullen eyes. When they proclaimed, through Edwards, their spokesman,
"We've had enough of this, and we mean it," I answered very readily, "So have I. Let's go."
VII
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!"
II
My return home to Lady Grove was a very different thing from what I had anticipated when I had got out to sea with my load of quap and fancied the Perfect-Filament was safe within my grasp. As I walked through the evening light along the downs, the summer stillness seemed like the stillness of something newly dead.
There were no lurking workmen any more, no cyclists on the high road.
Cessation was manifest everywhere. There had been, I learnt from my aunt, a touching and quite voluntary demonstration when the Crest Hill work had come to an end and the men had drawn their last pay; they had cheered my uncle and hooted the contractors and Lord Boom.
I cannot now recall the manner in which my aunt and I greeted one another. I must have been very tired there, but whatever impression was made has gone out of my memory. But I recall very clearly how we sat at the little round table near the big window that gave on the terrace, and dined and talked. I remember her talking of my uncle.
She asked after him, and whether he seemed well. "I wish I could help," she said. "But I've never helped him much, never. His way of doing things was never mine. And since--since--. Since he began to get so rich, he's kept things from me. In the old days--it was different....
"There he is--I don't know what he's doing. He won't have me near him....
"More's kept from me than anyone. The very servants won't let me know. They try and stop the worst of the papers--Boom's things--from coming upstairs.... I suppose they've got him in a corner, George. Poor old Teddy! Poor old Adam and Eve we are!
Ficial Receivers with flaming swords to drive us out of our garden! I'd hoped we'd never have another Trek. Well--anyway, it won't be Crest Hill.... But it's hard on Teddy. He must be in such a mess up there. Poor old chap. I suppose we can't help him. I suppose we'd only worry him. Have some more soup George--while there is some?..."
The next day was one of those days of strong perception that stand out clear in one's memory when the common course of days is blurred. I can recall now the awakening in the large familiar room that was always kept for me, and how I lay staring at its chintz-covered chairs, its spaced fine furniture, its glimpse of the cedars without, and thought that all this had to end.
I have never been greedy for money, I have never wanted to be rich, but I felt now an immense sense of impending deprivation.
I read the newspapers after breakfast--I and my aunt together--and then I walked up to see what Cothope had done in the matter of Lord Roberts B. Never before had I appreciated so acutely the ample brightness of the Lady Grove gardens, the dignity and wide peace of all about me. It was one of those warm mornings in late May that have won all the glory of summer without losing the gay delicacy of spring. The shrubbery was bright with laburnum and lilac, the beds swarmed with daffodils and narcissi and with lilies of the valley in the shade.
I went along the well-kept paths among the rhododendra and through the private gate into the woods where the bluebells and common orchid were in profusion. Never before had I tasted so completely the fine sense of privilege and ownership. And all this has to end, I told myself, all this has to end.
Neither my uncle nor I had made any provision for disaster; all we had was in the game, and I had little doubt now of the completeness of our ruin. For the first time in my life since he had sent me that wonderful telegram of his I had to consider that common anxiety of mankind,--Employment. I had to come off my magic carpet and walk once more in the world.
And suddenly I found myself at the cross drives where I had seen Beatrice for the first time after so many years. It is strange, but so far as I can recollect I had not thought of her once since I had landed at Plymouth. No doubt she had filled the background of my mind, but I do not remember one definite, clear thought. I had been intent on my uncle and the financial collapse.
It came like a blow in the face now; all that, too, had to end!
Suddenly I was filled with the thought of her and a great longing for her. What would she do when she realised our immense disaster? What would she do? How would she take it? It filled me with astonishment to realise how little I could tell....
Should I perhaps presently happen upon her?
I went on through the plantations and out upon the downs, and thence I saw Cothope with a new glider of his own design soaring down wind to my old familiar "grounding" place. To judge by its long rhythm it was a very good glider. "Like Cothope's cheek,"
thought I, "to go on with the research. I wonder if he's keeping notes.... But all this will have to stop."
He was sincerely glad to see me. "It's been a rum go," he said.
He had been there without wages for a month, a man forgotten in the rush of events.
"I just stuck on and did what I could with the stuff. I got a bit of money of my own--and I said to myself, 'Well, here you are with the gear and no one to look after you. You won't get such a chance again, my boy, not in all your born days. Why not make what you can with it? '"
"How's Lord Roberts B?"
