Читать книгу Madame Gilbert's Cannibal - Bennet Copplestone - Страница 5

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"Why Humming Top?" asked Madame Gilbert.

It was early in March, and the devastation wrought by the Admiralty in the yacht's graceful interior had been obliterated by the skilled hands of White of Cowes. Her upper and main decks had been entirely refashioned, and nothing remained of her armament except a brass signal gun forward. At the main mast head waved in the breeze the burgee of the Royal Thames Yacht Club, and from the inclined jackstaff at her stern hung the Blue Ensign which it is the privilege of that Club to wear. The Humming Top lay in the Test above Southampton just where the magazines of Marchwood front the river. Madame Gilbert leaned upon the bridge rail, and beside her, as close beside her as Madame would permit, stood the Baronet of Wigan.

Sir John Toppys had been presented to Madame some weeks earlier, and between them a friendship had ripened. In due course, when the Humming Top, completed and ready for sea, had been towed to her moorings off Marchwood, Sir John had pressed Madame to honour the vessel with her presence. She, not unwilling to inspect the yacht in which she was to traverse the seas of the wide world, and not unwilling to double-lock her chains upon the Baronet's proffered neck, had consented to travel in his company to Southampton on the visit of introduction. Together they had examined the sleeping quarters on the main deck allotted to Madame and her maid, and the lady had gratified her host by suggesting some small alterations. Notebook in hand he hung upon her lips.

"My room is splendid," said she, "and I am so glad that you have given me a proper spring bed instead of a snuffy bunk. If you will have a light fitted at the head of my bed, and a bell push so that I can switch off the light or summon my maid without moving more than my hand, the room will be just perfect."

"I will give orders at once," declared Sir John Toppys. "You are sure that there is no further way in which I may meet your wishes?"

"None at present," said Madame. "If I think of anything else, I will let you know. She is a lovely boat, but why do you call her the Humming Top?"

Sir John Toppys had not succumbed so far to the spells of Madame as to have wholly lost his earlier suspicion that the Toppys Family and fortunes were in her eyes objects of derision. She was so frank in her laughter at their ancestral pretensions, she proclaimed so openly that she embarked on her voyage to the South Seas as a glorious rag, that in time he had become disarmed. If she felt as she professed to feel, surely she would be less open in profession. Still now and then Madame would shoot out a question which did awaken in the baronet's mind a feeling that his leg was about to be pulled. Before, therefore, answering her inquiry he reflected for a moment upon her possible motive.

Even to him the explanation was rather absurd. "The epithet 'humming' suggests the whirr of the turbines," muttered he. "There is no hammer, hammer, hammer, clank, clank, clank, about this yacht. She whirrs, hums, just like a top."

"Quite so," assented Madame drily. "Nevertheless, I do not think——"

"You are right," put in Toppys hastily—it was better to be frank in confession. "We should not have chosen this name had we not desired it to suggest a Family Possession."

"Toppys, pronounced Tops," whispered Madame wickedly. "Plural Tops, singular Top. Humming Top—the Top that Hums. What extraordinary worshippers of the Family gods you are. I fully expect to find that Willatopy is a faithful student of the Family Tree. He probably keeps it stuck up in his hut."

"God forbid!" cried the Baronet of Wigan.

He was not a Bad Baronet, and certainly not Bold in the presence of Madame. She, expecting to meet the typical fat-bellied profiteer of the popular cartoons, had at their first introduction been struck almost speechless with surprise. This the King of Coal and Iron, the Maker of Guns and Shells, the Wallower in unholy War Profits! She saw before her a small thin gentleman, whose careful dress and trimmed white moustache suggested a military club. When he spoke, Winchester and Oxford spoke. This a Baronet of Wigan! Madame rubbed her eyes. Further acquaintance revealed the explanation. John Toppys possessed the caste marks of his long line; he had been educated as the Toppyses—though in extremest poverty—had always been educated. He, almost alone in the records of his House, had taken to common business and shone in it. He was no higgler, he could not have run a draper's shop, but when representing a big firm doing big things in a big way he found that doors would open to the pukka sahib John Toppys which would remain obstinately closed to plebeian rivals. John Toppys had built his fortune on the secure basis of the essential snobbishness of the English people. To his firm he had been invaluable—for he knew how to use the entrée which was his by right of blood—he had brought to them business of the best. And when later on he became the senior partner, and the chief partaker in the profits, the war cloud burst and wealth showered upon him. In his position it would have required extraordinarily perverse skill not to have made money in car loads. Successive Governments did their utmost to stuff him, and his like, full of wealth. Thus, Sir John Toppys became a War Profiteer—almost against his own will—but though a Profiteer on a superlative scale, he remained a pukka sahib. Madame liked him.

"Now that I have seen the Humming Top," said Madame, "I know that I am blessed among women. At no cost to myself—though at very much to you, Sir John Toppys—I am going to have the time of my life. From May to September in the Torres Straits the climate is divine. A day temperature between 75 and 85, no rain, a perpetual trade wind from the cool south-east, nights in which one may sleep comfortably and days in which one may revel in the tropical winter. It must be like Khartoum without the dust and with the sea thrown in. I shall swim in the sun and devour bananas in the shade. I shall hunt dugong and turtle, and fish in the tumbled waters of the Great Barrier. You will observe from my local colour that I have been studying the subject. I have. For me this preposterous enterprise will be full of joy; for you it will be full of expense and will end in exasperation. Why not back out while there is yet time? Surely you are not like that thick-headed Roger Gatepath. You do not suppose that anything, except a pleasant holiday for Madame Gilbert, will spring from this cruise of mine?"

"The expense to me is nothing," said the Baronet. "I am smothered in ill-gotten wealth. And if some of my money can give you pleasure, it is well spent, Madame. I would do more than write cheques to give you pleasure. And as for your enterprise, is it destined to be empty of result? I think more highly of your resource than that. Dawson says that there is nothing which you dare not do if your interest be stimulated." He saw the angry flush spring out on Madame's forehead. "You mistake my meaning, Madame. It was not the stimulus of money that I had in mind. It was the overwhelming impulse of your artistic genius. When you confront a problem, however bleakly impossible it may be, you never fail of solution. Dawson says so. You have not concerned yourself with our family affairs because of any interest in our troubles. You laugh at them. It is because no man or woman alive, except Madame Gilbert, could resolve a skein so hopelessly entangled."

"I see no solution. Sir John. And though I sail at your expense, I am not on your side. I am free to help or to hinder, at my pleasure."

"We are all at Madame Gilbert's pleasure," said Toppys, smiling. "We know, you and I, that Roger Gatepath is two parts flunkey, one quarter fool, and the other quarter unscrupulous lawyer. He cares for nothing except for the connections and profits of his firm. He would lick the new Lord Topsham's tawny feet if he did not fear to lose some handfuls from my golden pile. I do not value the Barony at a rush for myself, but there is in my blood a centuries-old reverence for my Family. Rather than that coloured brat yonder should be recognised as the Head of my House, I would strangle him with my own hands. If you can save us from that horror, Madame, there is nothing which is in my power to grant that I would not lay at your feet."

"Absurd as it may seem, Sir John, I have a conscience. Madame Gilbert is not for sale."

"No. I should not value you if you were. And believe me I rate you very highly. You will go out in this yacht to the Torres Straits, and you will follow your conscience. Maybe you will bring back the Twenty-Eighth Baron in your train and set him yourself upon his seat. There is no contract between us; you are free to do even this. Be just to me, Madame. I have offered you nothing except a free passage; I have never sought to bribe you. In my heart I knew that it would be useless. Whatever may be the end, Madame, I shall always cherish these weeks of our friendship."

"As a Toppys you are not a little ridiculous," said Madame. "But as a man you are white all through."

She held out her hand to him there on the bridge of the Humming Top, and Toppys, stooping, kissed her fingers. "Thank you," said he, simply.

Although Madame had made a sketchy inspection of the yacht in the company of Sir John Toppys, she learned very little of its fascinating merits until she came aboard in act to sail. The crew were already at their quarters when Madame was ceremoniously received on board by Captain Ching the skipper, and the Chief Engineer, Ewing. She had already given orders—Sir John Toppys had assigned to her his full powers and prerogatives as owner—she had already given orders that the chief officers should mess with her in the pretty little saloon on the upper deck, aft of which was a snug "Owner's Room"—equipped with writing-table and bookcases—which she reserved for her own private occupation. Whenever their duties permitted of social relaxation, Madame had determined that the Captain and Chief Engineer should be her intimate companions. It was no new experience for Madame to be the one woman in a company of men—her maid did not count—and she who had the free outlook and high courage of a man, enjoyed the privileges of a double sex. In repose she was a woman; in action a man.