The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife (39 page)

To the normal healthy gregarious boy—and Mr. Darby was all that—the pain of farewell to home and family at the end of the holidays is a brief one, soon eclipsed by reunion with friends and the improved status which each new term brings. So it was with Mr. Darby. When he had waved farewell to Sarah and dried his eyes and spectacles, it at once occurred to him that afternoon-tea followed by a cigar would provide a much-needed consolation. He therefore sought the lounge, and while Sarah took her desolate way back to London, Mr. Darby reclined in a deep chair very placidly drinking tea and surveying with a critical benevolence the furniture of the lounge and the people who were to be his fellow travellers. But for the smooth flowing past the windows of warehouses, chimneys and sometimes a church-tower or steeple; but for the strong, subdued rumble of the engines and the pulse of them in the floor beneath his feet, he might have been in an hotel. That pulse, with its faint suggestion of liveness, of instability, disturbed Mr. Darby deliciously, gave to him and kept active in him a small, stimulating sense of adventure. The whole great ship fascinated him: it was delightful to be living simultaneously the life of luxurious civilization and the life of adventure. For the rest of the day he spent a great deal of time in moving busily about the ship. After taking a few turns on the promenade deck, he would clap a hand to his pocket as though suddenly missing some indispensable trifle and hurry down to his cabin, losing his way several times in the process; and then, arrived at last in the privacy of his cabin he would abandon pretence and stand for a few moments surveying its rose-coloured luxury with bland satisfaction and then bustle back on deck. Or if
he found Punnett in his cabin he would fumble again in his pocket and ask: ‘Punnett, have you by any chance seen my … ah … cigar-cutter? ‘and then, trying another pocket, would add: ‘Ah! here it is, to be sure!'

That phrase ‘to be sure' had begun to occur more and more often in Mr. Darby's talk since he had heard it several times on the lips of a very grand old gentleman at the Savers-hills' dinner-party. He pronounced it, ‘to be shaw,' as the old gentleman had done. At times it became almost a nuisance to him, intruding itself at the most unexpected and inappropriate moments.

The first-class passengers were not very numerous and Mr. Darby found at dinner that he had been allotted a small table to himself. He was hungry, the dinner was excellent, and to console himself for the pain of parting from Sarah and England he wisely allowed himself a half-bottle of champagne. Between the courses he examined once again his fellow-travellers. A few tables away sat another solitary, a man of medium height and medium age, somewhat thickset, brown-haired, brown-moustached, squared faced, and about his mouth and eyes an expression of subdued humour as if he were enjoying a secret joke. His manner was one of quiet self-possession, as if accustomed to this kind of life. Next to him sat a middle-aged couple, the lady very stout, very fashionably dressed, her husband, bald, red faced, and clean-shaven but for a close-cropped grey moustache. Mr. Darby did not like them. The trouble with the lady, he thought, was that, though stout, she dressed as if thin, so that she appeared as a collection of shocking redundancies. Even her face contrived to look indecent. Of the gentleman Mr. Darby felt himself vaguely afraid. His narrow mouth, his hot red face, his hot blue eyes, even his scanty, close-cropped hair and moustache looked brutal and overbearing. At another table within range of Mr. Darby's inspection sat a very pretty, vivacious girl, a good-looking young man and a grey-haired, determined woman obviously their mother. The young people chattered and laughed and the mother smiled with amused tolerance and occasionally let fall a phrase.
The lady and gentleman that came next under Mr. Darby's scrutiny roused his curiosity more than any of the others. He had noted the lady as she came into the dining-saloon. She was very tall and slim and was dressed in rose-coloured silk. Diamonds flashed from her breast and there was a flash when she moved her fingers. Mr. Darby could see that she was very much made up. Her features were perfect: the perfectly arched eyebrows, the almond-shaped eyes, the straight, delicate nose, the large, beautiful, derisive mouth looked as if they had been carefully drawn in pencil and faultlessly coloured. Her close fitting hair was like shining black lacquer. Mr. Darby feared her, as he had feared Lady Savers-hill, for she had the same high-handed masterful manner as Lady Savershill. But she was much less human: indeed she seemed to Mr. Darby not human at all. Not human, and, despite her superficial youth, old; a woman who had had the life and youth frozen out of her. As Mr. Darby watched her, he caught her eye, and for a moment she inspected him with a gaze void of interest, hard as glass, as if he had been a bottle or a flower-pot, and then, finding him beneath notice, ignored him. But that brief gaze had been enough to make Mr. Darby feel extremely uncomfortable. His dignity and his self-esteem were annihilated. He blushed, cleared his throat and fell into a contemplation of his champagne glass. It was several minutes before he became his old self again. When he ventured to glance in the formidable lady's direction again she was talking to her companion. Could he be her son? He was tall, athletic and young, with a moustache almost as wide as his face, tufted at the ends. He wore an eyeglass. Mr. Darby judged him to be very much a gentleman, an aristocrat perhaps, but rather a fop. ‘Rather like the Stedmans' cat,' thought Mr. Darby. ‘Yes, a … ah … tom-cat!' And the lady too must be an aristocrat: that was why she had made him think of Lady Savershill. Mr. Darby, for the first time since he had come on board, felt a pang of loneliness. It seemed impossible that he would make friends with any of these people, except, conceivably, the quiet-looking solitary man with whom he had begun his inspection.
Perhaps some of the others whom he had not yet seen at close quarters would be pleasanter.

After dinner Mr. Darby betook himself to the smoking-room. Several men were already seated there. The red-faced brutal man was sunk in a deep chair in the very centre of the room, an immense cigar was stuck, like a peg, into the middle of his face. Mr. Darby, shying away from him, found himself facing the quiet, humorous man who had sat alone in the dining-saloon. The chair next to his was vacant, and Mr. Darby, indicating it with an open palm, asked with a polite cock-robin bow: ‘May I … ah …?'

‘Pray do!' said the quiet man with a pleasant, dry smile.

Mr. Darby seated himself and took out his cigar-case. He opened it, gravely contemplated the contents and then handed it to his neighbour. ‘Do you … ah …?'

The quiet man glanced at the cigars, hesitated, and said: ‘You're very kind, sir. Are they fairly mild?'

‘Oh, quite! Quite!' said Mr. Darby. ‘I can't smoke strong ones.'

The quiet man took one and Mr. Darby selected one for himself, inspected it doubtfully, rolled it between finger and thumb, listening to it like a robin listening for a worm in a lawn, and decided that it was good. When both cigars were alight the quiet man asked Mr. Darby if he was going far.

‘All the way, sir!' said Mr. Darby. ‘In point of fact, to Sydney.'

‘I too am going to Sydney,' said the other.

Mr. Darby bowed. ‘I'm glad, very glad, that I shall have the … ah … pleasure …! My name, sir, is Darby,—William James Darby!'

‘And mine,' said the quiet man, ‘ is Wilfrid Amberley.'

‘Yes,' pursued Mr. Darby, ‘business calls me to Sydney.'

Mr. Amberley smiled. ‘I fear I have no excuse.'

Mr. Darby nodded. ‘To be shaw! Merely pleasure, I presume.'

‘Curiosity, rather; pursuit of experience. Whatever it is, it applies to the voyage and not to the destination. As soon as I get to Sydney I shall leave it.'

‘You don't like Sydney, then?'

‘No. I've never been there, but it's a modern town and so I know already that I don't like it.'

‘Isn't that rather what I should call … ah … sweeping?' asked Mr. Darby, pursing his lips and putting his head on one side.

‘Oh completely!' said Mr. Amberley. ‘It was meant to be. A modern town is a manifestation of modern life and modern life is disgusting. There, in that chair there, you have another manifestation.' He pointed at the red-faced brutal man, who sprawled with closed eyes. ‘Do you, Mr. Darby, know who that is?'

‘No! Ah, no! I must confess …' said Mr. Darby.

‘That's Gudgeon, Gudgeon's Nerve Food.'

Mr. Darby was thunderstruck. He turned in his chair and inspected the sleeping form with profound interest. ‘Why, bless my soul!' he said. ‘To be shaw! Fancy that, now! A world-famous name, one might say! A household word!'

‘Precisely! Have you tried the Nerve Food?'

‘Never!' replied Mr. Darby. ‘My wife doesn't approve of patent medicines. But I understand, from what I hear, that it's wonderful.'

‘Wonderful for trade, but quite useless for nerves,' said Mr. Amberley; ‘except in so far as anything is good for nerves if the nervous one has faith. And that, now that I come to think of it, is our friend's justification; in fact, it throws a very beautiful light upon him. He doesn't look, does he, like a great religious teacher? And yet he evokes in countless guileless souls a pure, unadulterated faith. I say unadulterated advisedly, because they cure themselves without the smallest material assistance from the Nerve Food, which, a chemist friend of mine assures me, consists solely of pulverized sawdust, soap, and a little sugar.'

Mr. Darby was growing accustomed to his friend's dry humour, and took this statement as an example of it. It had never occurred to him to doubt that all patent medicines were what they professed themselves to be.

As he was on his way to bed that evening the long corridor
idly and slowly stirred itself and the left wall rubbed itself against him like a cat. Mr. Darby was extremely disconcerted. When he had regained his balance, he hurried to his cabin. His cabin heeled gently as though under his weight and the long swish of moving water was heard through the open porthole. These vague denials of stability repeated themselves and Mr. Darby got hastily to bed. There he found them less disagreeable, managed, in fact, by imagining he was being rocked in a cradle, to get a little tentative enjoyment out of them.

When he awoke next morning, the sea, to his surprise and relief, was calm. He had anticipated a storm.

After breakfast he stepped out on to the promenade deck. People were walking up and down in twos and threes. He found his friend Mr. Amberley seated alone in a deck-chair. Seeing Mr. Darby he made a gesture offering him the chair next his. Mr. Darby bowed, sat down, and accepted a cigarette.

‘A poor return, I'm afraid, for your admirable cigar,' said Mr. Amberley. ‘I have been watching the animals at play. Our Nerve Feeder and his woman are not pretty movers, are they?'

Mr. Darby turned his head in time to see the great Gudgeon forge past in a huge open great-coat and grey felt hat, with an enormous cigar stuck in his mouth. He walked as if concentrated on the task of pushing his knees and his stomach in front of him. Mrs. Gudgeon was invisible behind him.

‘I wonder,' said Mr. Amberley reflectively, ‘if that cigar is a sham one: a thin shell of tobacco-leaf stuffed with sawdust.'

But Mr. Darby's attention had wandered to the next couple, the hard, handsome lady who had been dressed, last night, in rose-coloured silk and the aristocratic young man with the eyeglass who was rather like the Stedmans' cat. He was dressed now in a smart double-breasted blue suit and she, too, wore dark blue with white, green and silver at the wrists and throat, and a green straw hat. In the light of day
her age was still more evident. It was evident in a hollowness at the temples and the grim droop of the mouth.

‘I see,' said Mr. Amberley's quiet voice, ‘that the bold bad Baroness has added another to her victims.'

‘The Baroness?'

‘Yes, the lady you were inspecting with so much admiration just now.'

‘She's a Baroness?'

‘She was, till she recently acquired another alias by marrying that young nincompoop Sir Alistair Gissingham. She must be at least double his age. In her previous incarnation she was the notorious Baroness Bluthner. You remember the famous case.'

‘Oh … ah … indeed!' said Mr. Darby, who had never heard of the Baroness or the case. ‘To be shaw now! Very intrigguous! One felt at once she had what I should call a history.'

‘I wonder how long she'll take to train young Gissingham to shoot himself. She got poor Bluthner to score a bull in two years.'

‘Very shocking, very shocking indeed!' said Mr. Darby. ‘Personally I don't find her … ah … attractive: rather too much of an obelisk for my taste. I chanced to catch her eye last night at dinner and, upon my word, I felt what I should call a shiver go through me.'

‘My dear Mr. Darby,' said Mr. Amberley quietly, ‘you have defined her exactly: not quite the odalisque, not completely the basilisk, but just precisely an obelisk,—an obelisk, like Cleopatra's Needle, that has lost a good deal of its surface decoration.'

It was evident to Mr. Darby that Mr. Amberley was something of a character, by which he meant that Mr. Amberley had curious ideas of his own, ideas which caused him, in the middle of a perfectly sensible conversation, to break suddenly into Double Dutch. In this jumble of references to odalisques and basilisks and Cleopatra's Needle Mr. Darby felt that Mr. Amberley had wandered off into a world of his own. He had not the slightest idea what he was talking about. He was
anxious therefore to change the subject; and the fact that, for some undiscoverable reason, Cleopatra's Needle had instantly suggested to him the Mandratic Peninsula, provided him at once with a smooth transition.

‘Speaking of Cleopatra's Needle,' he said to the astonished Mr. Amberley, ‘are you at all … ah … what I should call familiar with … ah … Mandratia?'