Читать книгу Children of the Wind - Matthew Phipps Shiel - Страница 12

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Before Madeira was passed, Rolls had become an institution in the ship. He liked winds in his hair, and dismal nights, when he had the vessel and the universe to himself, and sometimes the saloon-dinner was his breakfast, he was such a night-fowl, scarcely mixing with the others—differing from Cobby, who let himself be led into whist-drive, sweepstake, saloon-ball and nonsense-talk under the quarter-deck awning. Cobby's name as a scientist having been known to two or three beforehand, as he saw himself sought after, he lent himself. But he wrote in his diary: "This is dreadful! This emptiness and waste of days. But what idle people! and I as idle as any of them. May Spiciewegiehotiu perish...."

A voyage to the monotony of whose routine the engines' throbbing beat its monotonous baton, until the eighteenth night, or nineteenth morning say, when Cobby in his sleep had a feeling that he was not alone, and woke in a flurry to find the ship pitching, and there on his bedside, when he switched on the light, Rolls seated, gravely meditating on a cigar between his fingers, wind from a porthole winnowing within his bare hair.

"I'm not sorry you've woke up," he said. "Myself, I always sleep with my state-room locked, and you should ditto. There's an enemy aboard, look."

A new idea for Cobby. "How do you arrive at that?"

"Just played it on me," Rolls answered—"narrowest escape! I all but disappeared over the side—'suicide whilst of unsound mind.' On blowy nights I generally go up the foremosts shrouds, to have things to myself a bit—was up there a couple of hours—rough stuff—dark—then got down. When I stepped upon the lowest ratlins, they weren't ratlins any more—cut through. Feet pitched overboard, dragging off my hand-hold; my clutches missed one, two, of the upper ratlins—didn't miss the third, or I should be well astern by now. But if you're born to be hanged, you never will be drowned."

"Incredible licence!" breathed Cobby. "Who can it be?"

"There you beat me—though I expected he'd not be far, and have been on the look-out to spot him. Anyway, here he is."

"And are the ratlins of fibre or wire?"

"Wire-rope those foremost ones."

"Then he must have a hack-saw. We will report to the captain, and have a search——"

Rolls threw his hand. "Of course, the captain will know; but that says nothing. The bottom of the Atlantic is a fine place to hide a hack-saw—if he didn't nick it from the ship's chest, to put back after using...."

This thing sensationalized the last three days of the voyage for everyone—an eruption in the uninterrupted.

Only one man—a steerage passenger—did not appear in the assembly before the captain in the saloon: him the doctor reported to be ill—had pharyngitis—inflammation of the mouth—had to be interviewed separately in his bunk.

"Which of them would that be?" Rolls asked himself.

Knowing all the faces present, and unable to recall the absent face, he conceived a curiosity to see it, and the next morning took down a bottle of "bub" (rum-and-milk), in a neighbourly way to the sick one—"something to keep the blues out, friend."

He was warmly thanked with nods, but no words, the sick mouth being covered with a cloth, the brow bound about with a towel, so that, as it was dim within the bunk, Rolls got only a dim impression of a nose.

Nor was there time to repeat the visit: now loomed on the ocean's brink that bluff bulk of Table Mountain, with a table-cloth of cloud, and silver dish-covers of cumulus-mounds, the mass of which, Rolls told Cobby, recalled to him "The Elephant" of Wo-Ngwanya; and soon, as the liner warped up, all was an arrival-scene of greetings and luggage, tips and kisses, pith-helmets with pugarees swinging, sunshades and white attire fluttering, all in a colonial tone of its own, dotted with various shades of blackness trotting to and fro, from Hottentot copper to Madagascar blacking; and here Rolls was sweetly at home, Cobby following in his wake from quayside through custom's officer to dock-gates, asking of Rolls in respect of the Malay who drove them to Cape Town, "Why does the being vociferate so needlessly?" to which Rolls philosophically answered: "Has a fare—sort of song of joy that he blows off, look, like the hylobates ape: let him howl away."

And when the sun sank, and sudden darkness invaded Nature, said Cobby, thinking again of his Malay: "We might have done well to travel in our cab, which was as breezily speedy as the train is lazy. How long, Rolls, before the expedition actually starts out?"

Rolls said: "Three weeks, I reckon."

"Ah! three weeks.... Well, provided I am back in Fleet Street in a year—that is your undertaking."

Rolls' eyes twinkled. "No, not undertaking. You wait—you won't be so fidgety when Africa once gets its grip on you. Even this Karoo seems to you now a meaningless reach of plain, doesn't it?—no trees, nothing—yet it has a meaning of its own—says something, sings something. Hark! heard that cry? A riet-bok that is, out there in the vastness and darkness—never saw a train before: I know it from the way he whistled. He's living still away back in the bottomless pit of the geologic ages, that chap: all this Africa is. Wait till you see a geologic river washing solemn along, with the hippo's nostril snorting out in the choppy mid-channel: he's pretty old and knowing, that cove. But, of course, we'll be looking as lively as we know how: let's only hope we're not crossed and balked any road, for the enemy has a long arm. I'm all-out gallied now about not getting to see that sick man's face aboard. I wonder what's wrong with his mouth?—'inflamed mouth': never heard of that disease in man. I looked out at the landing, but no sign of him."

Snuggled in a corner, his eyes closed to the world, Cobby murmured: "I think I know who he is—saw him first in England. Some poor man—carried my bag along the dock."

"And was anything wrong with his mouth then?"

"Let me see—Yes, I fancy now that he spoke with some impediment or effort."

When Rolls next spoke, he got no answer: Cobby was asleep.

Then by way of the corrugated townlet, past the rock-kopie, the stead of the Boer alone in the world with his ostrich-kraal, the journey was to the Gold-town, where at once Rolls threw himself into the work of getting together map and plan, man and automatic, inspan and biltong, bead and button, medicine-chest and waggon-box. And all went merrily well, save at one point—the sweeping-in of at least one other white, for which he was eager. He got two, indeed, but both failed him.

The first, a transport-rider of Natal, a fellow of grit, though addicted to "square-face," and now down on his luck, readily agreed, said to Rolls, "The thing I'm after—a dart into the interior," and a bargain was struck. But soon afterwards Rolls, on entering Botha's Yard in Commissioner Street, where the waggons were, spied his transport-rider head-to-head in a confab with a broker: and the next day the fellow vanished.

It was the same with the second, a Texan—Kimberley adventurer, up-country hunter, who dreamed in millions, though to-day broken in boots—he had all but fixed-up with Rolls, but then cooled off, and when he suddenly began to throw money about, Rolls understood that this one, too, had been soaped.

"They're at us again," Rolls said, when Cobby got back from a trip to a vlei up north, whither two mining-engineers had taken him to shoot veldt-duck and antelope. "They reckon I'm too wide-awake and chock-full of six-shooters to be knocked out from a corner over here, where I'm a cock in my own yard; but they aim now to make us a pair of lone hands among a crowd of blacks——"

"It doesn't seem to me of great importance," Cobby remarked.

"Blacks do such things as mutiny, don't they?" Rolls demanded.

"Well, there are still three days to try in. If you come across any possible man, strike hands with him on the spot, then send him out of the town beyond temptation."

Which was what Cobby himself did on the following evening; for, as he was smoking on his hotel stoep, the light of day then dying out, a man appeared before him—the man whom he had seen at the dock in England, and then on the liner; and said the man: "Here we are again, sir! I got it from a certain party that you are after a white for up-country trekking, and I'm in it, if you'll have me—stones, gold, ivory, makes no matter to me."

"Sit down.... When did you come to Johannesburg?"

"Only yesterday. Been in Cape Town."

"What brought you to South Africa?"

"You should ask what took me to England. I know South Africa—Australia. Fortune-hunter—I haven't always carried gentlemen's bags for a bob." He chuckled.

"You can shoot, then, probably."

The man snatched a revolver from his hip-pocket, and negligently shot a peach from a tree in the yard.

"Good in this half-light"—Cobby presented some vegueras—"have a cigar."

"Thanks—I'm in misery—can't smoke——"

"Not well yet?"

"Better—not well. You hear how I talk—across a hot potato."

"Yes, I can tell that there is something. Healthy otherwise?"

"Oh, yes, I'm all there." He chuckled.

"Talk Zulu?"

"Some. Can cluck some Hottentot, too."

"Well, come inside: I'll send for my partner, Mr. Rolls, and we'll discuss details."

But Rolls, sent for, could not be found; and Cobby, apprehensive lest this one also should be got at, struck a bargain, asking, as he wrote a contract: "What is your name?"

"Douglas Macray."

Cobby's pen paused in air. Looking at the man, he muttered, "Singular"; and added with a smile: "You are not, I take it, the millionaire of that name?"

"W-e-ll, I'm afraid not, if there is such a millionaire. But never say die, sir! I may yet stand in his shoes."

Now, frowning in an effort of memory, Cobby asked: "Where have I seen you before? Some where."

"Dartmoor jail, sir." He chuckled.

"No, I never was there. You?"

"Well, no—not actually inside. I wouldn't say that the traps have never been after me, but they never yet got me."

Cobby smiled on him—liked a certain hardihood, stoicism, and cheery frankness which was about him.

"Well, sign," he said, and, this done, wrote a letter to a Boer at whose stead he had slept during his hunting-trip, a letter of no importance in itself, only written in order to get Macray, who was to take it, out of reach of schemers. "We others will perhaps have started before you get back," he said, "but you will readily pick up our spoor. Here's the cash; and now I will come with you to the yard."

There Cobby saw him horsed and off, then walked back to his hotel, wondering what had become of Rolls.

It was not till an hour later that Rolls came in, looking sour, to tell the tale that, having gone with one of the Square auctioneers to drink a bottle of fizz, they both had got imprisoned in a room—something gone wrong with the catch of the door, which in the end had had to be forced.

In view of which odd disease of the door-catch, when Cobby told of the bargain with the man whose mouth was sore, Rolls' countenance fell.

"My God, Cobby," he said ruefully, "you might have waited for me to crop up."

"Why, though?" Cobby asked.

Rolls had no answer; but felt ill at ease.

"And what do you think his name is?" asked Cobby.

"Beelzebub—I shouldn't wonder," said Rolls, strolling about.

"Douglas Macray."

"Same thing as Beelzebub," said Rolls.... "But you mean to say he had the devil's cheek to give you that name?"

"Oh, no cheek, I think; that chances to be the fellow's name: he's all right."

"Well, you're the newest of new chums, and no mistake! Haven't you learned yet to mistrust your man, Cobby?"

"The man is all right," Cobby obstinately repeated.

And, as arranged, the expedition duly started the next afternoon; but not till nine in the night, when it had outspanned twenty miles up in the interior, did Macray with new hunter's-swag and outfit ride in; on which Rolls and he, for the first time, looked into each other's eyes.