The Lighthearted Quest Page 3

  Her cabin, when she reached it, after negotiating the precipitous gangway and following the mate along decks as black and filthy as the rest of the ship, proved a rather agreeable surprise. It was quite a sizable little room, containing besides a substantial bunk with drawers below it, a hanging-cupboard, a desk-cum-chest of drawers, a fitted basin, and a big padded sofa built against the bulkhead.

  “Fine,” said Julia, looking around her. “But my luggage won’t all go in here. Stop,” she said firmly to the boy, who was beginning to pile her cases onto the sofa—“only bring in what I tell you. Yes, the typewriter, and those two small ones; that’s all for here.” She turned to the officer, who loomed, still grinning slightly, in the passageway outside, and asked—“Where does the rest go? You would hardly have a baggage-room, with only one passenger?”

  “No, afraid not.”

  “Well, will you have it put somewhere—dry” said Julia calmly.

  “Is the pilot’s cabin unlocked?” the first officer asked the boy.

  “Yessir.”

  “All right—put it in there.”

  The pilot’s cabin was next door to Julia’s, similarly furnished and equally large; she supervised the stowing of the rest of her luggage in it, remarking, “Very handy,” to the mate.

  “You all right now?” he asked, still looking amused.

  “No. I must have the keys to lock both these cabins. You can’t leave cabins unlocked in port,” said Julia. “And then I want to telephone, as there’s this delay. Is the ship connected up by telephone?”

  “No—not a liner, you know,” said the mate. “But you Could ring up from the agents’ office on the quay.”

  “Where is that?”

  “I’ll show you,”—and the keys having been produced by the boy, he led her down the gang-ladder again and along the shed to a small door with a roughly-painted label outside which read “Forres Line. No Admittance”.

  “Thanks,” said Julia briefly; the bearded man, still grinning slightly, raised his hand to his cap and walked off.

  The office was a grubby little hole in which a red-haired individual sat at a desk, telephoning; another, wearing a felt hat and a stained raincoat, stood by the window, which was smothered in cobwebs, holding up long yellowish sheets of paper to catch the last light of the winter’s afternoon, and occasionally calling out figures to the one at the telephone, who repeated them down it; a third was tinkering with a very small electric fire, on which he succeeded in balancing a kettle just as Julia walked in. They all looked up, and the man at the telephone, saying, “Hold on,” asked if she wanted anything?

  “To telephone, when the line is free; to the head office,” Julia replied.

  The man with the kettle, who was very old, removed a pile of ledgers and a couple of beer-bottles from a chair, of which he dusted the seat with his sleeve before offering it to her; she sat down and waited. Presently the list came to an end, and the man at the desk asked her who she wanted at head office.

  “The passenger manager.”

  The passenger manager was ‘not available’.

  “Find out when he will be, please, and tell him to ring back. Miss Probyn to speak to him.—Can I wait here?” she asked.

  “Oh, surely. Have one of mine,” said the man at the window, as she pulled out her cigarette case. He looked at her subdued elegance curiously. “You’re not for the Vidago?”

  “Yes.”

  Julia enjoyed her wait in the Forres Line’s quayside office, in spite of her irritation over the delay in sailing. The old man brewed very strong tea on the electric fire, laid on its side, and they gave her a cup, thick with the glutinous over-sweetened condensed milk beloved of the merchant navy—she found time to wonder how the manufacturers contrived to introduce its peculiar and revolting flavour into this product, with which she was to become painfully familiar in the next few days. In spite of her toughness and temper Julia could be quite a good mixer when she chose, and it always interested her to know how operations were carried on in jobs and trades unfamiliar to her; she soon beguiled the three men in that grubby little room sufficiently to learn not only the reason for the Vidago’s delayed sailing, but a good deal about dockside labour as well.

  “The rain, you see,” said the red-haired man at the desk. “It came on heavy about eleven, and you can’t load in rain.”

  “Oh, why not?”

  “Soaks the holds; rots or rusts the cargo, and anyhow this docks’ shift’s short-handed today.”

  “Oh, why is that?” asked Julia, sipping the old man’s brew, which reminded her of a mixture of senna and stewed prunes.

  “The fight in Belfast,” said the man at the desk.

  “Really? How come?” enquired Julia.

  What she learned fascinated her. One of the dockers named Murphy had for brother a prize-fighter, who was appearing that night in a big fight in Belfast; so Murphy and his closest pals had chartered a private plane to fly to Northern Ireland to see the show, and large numbers of their comrades had gone off by special train to Liverpool, to cross by boat for the same purpose. This, more than the rain, had held up the loading of the Vidago. Julia hugged herself. The poor underpaid dockers, always striking for a living wage! Whoever heard of the socalled idle rich hiring private planes and trains nowadays? These views however she kept to herself.

  At length the telephone rang; the passenger manager, at last ‘available’, was on the line.

  “Oh, Mr. Scales,” said Julia, taking up the instrument—“Miss Probyn here—yes, down at the docks. Why didn’t you let me know that the boat isn’t sailing till tomorrow?”

  Mr. Scales was evasive. Really, he was extremely sorry, but he hadn’t known in time to let her know.

  “But the rain came on, and the men stopped work, at eleven—that meant there wasn’t a hope of getting her out on tonight’s tide,” said Julia inexorably; she had picked up a lot of information over her tea. “I only left home at two. Surely there would have been time?—in three hours?”

  Mr. Scales could almost be heard to wriggle down the telephone. He hadn’t heard quite at eleven o’clock; he really was very sorry it had occurred.

  “Well, I call it a very poor show,” said Julia. “Don’t you instruct your dockside staff to keep you informed when this sort of thing happens, so that you can warn your passengers?”

  “That’ll mean a raspberry for me,” muttered the red-haired man, grinning cheerfully, however.

  Mr. Scales meanwhile was asking what Miss Probyn meant to do? Could he do anything to help her?

  “I expect so. Have you a car?”

  Yes, Mr. Scales had a car.

  “Then you could come and fetch me, couldn’t you, and take me back to the West End?”

  “You’re not thinking of sleeping on board, then?”

  “Yes, certainly I am—my flat is shut, and I don’t see any point in paying for a room at an hotel because of this muddle,” said Julia firmly. “But I can spend the evening with friends. No, no hurry—so long as I start about six. Right—thank you.” She rang off.

  “It won’t really mean trouble for you, will it?” she asked the red-haired man. “What time did you tell the office?”

  “ ‘Bout twelve—and they know damn well up there that if the stevedores go off before twelve they never come back till after the dinner-hour, not if the sun was blazing.”

  “Scales is new,” said the man in the raincoat. “He doesn’t know the works yet.”

  “Have you any idea what time we shall get off tomorrow?” Julia asked him.

  “Not much before ten p.m., I’d say.” He turned to consult a dog-eared tide-table which hung on the wall by the window, near which he had remained standing all the time. “No, about ten she should be moving down into the Pool. But they’ll want you on board by nine.”

  “Oh, what a bore!” said Julia. “I did want to go down the river by daylight. Oh, well—and now can I have another call, please?”

  She tried to ring up Mrs. Hathaway, but that lady was out and would be out all the evening. Julia cast about in her mind who to try next: she had said goodbye to everybody, her flat was shut and her maid gone off to relations in the country; she felt as if her life in London had already, for the time being, come to an end. At last she bethought her of someone to whom she hadn’t said goodbye, nor even announced her departure, out of a cowardly desire to avoid what she privately phrased ‘bother’, when she was in a rush of packing and arrangements. For after a hurried routing round among cargo-lines she had come on the Vidago, sailing for Tangier in under a week and carrying one passenger; she had seized on this chance, but the ensuing days had been a frenzied scurry of what she called ‘lining-up’ the papers for which she wrote, securing her currency allocation, getting the appropriate visas on her passport and all the rest. The person to whom her thoughts now turned was a young man in the Treasury, who in a rather indeterminate way was an admirer—that is to say she had refused him once, he had sulked for some months, and latterly had begun to hang round her again. He was very nice; it was even possible that some day she might decide to marry him—meanwhile she had rather a bad conscience about having kept him in the dark regarding her trip, and he would, if free, certainly be delighted to take her out to dinner and a movie. So she asked for another call. (She made no offer to pay—this was all the Forres Line’s fault, anyhow.)

  “Is that the Treasury? Mr. Consett, please . . . Geoffrey? Oh, good . . . Dinner tonight? Yes, I’d love to; in fact I was going to suggest it. What time, and where? . . . Oh, could you make it a bit earlier? Sevenish for drinks? . . . No, not at the flat—it’s shut . . . Because I’m going away . . . Well, to Morocco actually—I’ll tell you all about it at supper . . . No, don’t bother to pick me up . . . Because I’m at the Lon
don Docks!” (Here Julia tried unsuccessfully to stifle a giggle.) “No, I’m being brought in to S.W.I.—someone’s doing penance! . . . Oh, Geoffrey, don’t be sour—I can’t explain it all now, and I won’t try! Where shall we dine? . . . The Oviedo? Right—but I shan’t dress . . . Well then come to my club at seven, for drinks. Goodbye.” She rang off.

  Both Julia’s telephone conversations had brought grins of pleasure to the faces of the other three occupants of the little office—a young lady, going on that little tub the Vidago, first ticking off the Head Office and then giving backchat to someone in the Treasury! When she got up and shook hands with them all, with thanks for their tea and their hospitality, each one wrung her hand warmly. “It’s been a pleasure. Come in any time,” said the old man.

  “Oh, I daresay you’ll see more of me tomorrow,” said Julia airily. “Goodbye, and thank you again.”

  She went back to her cabin, unpacked and put on a dark frock, with an eye to the gang-ladder, and did her face; on her way up she had yelled for ‘the boy’, and told him to send Mr. Scales to her cabin when he should arrive. But before that she had another encounter. Emerging to scout about for her escort she almost ran into a small elderly man with grey hair, a smooth grey face, and several gold bands on his sleeves.

  “Is it Miss Probyn?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, good evening. I’m sorry we’re not starting on time,” said this person. “I hope it’s not putting you about too much.”

  “Well, I thought the office might have told me about it,” said Julia, who believed in rubbing it in to companies or corporations.

  “Won’t you come and have a drink?” said the grey-haired man, opening a teak door in the corridor a few yards from her own.

  “I’d love to, if someone will tell Mr. Scales where to find me,” said Julia, passing through the door. The large, comfortably furnished room in which she found herself told her that she was in the Captain’s cabin; it had several of the built-in sofas, a big desk, some arm-chairs, and a cupboard in the wall with a shelf below holding a wooden rack of glasses.

  “Scales will find you here all right,” said the Captain slowly, moving over to the cupboard—he spoke even more deliberately than Julia herself. “What will you drink?—gin or whisky?”

  “Whisky, please.”

  “Do you like soda?” he asked, holding up a tumbler to the light and squinting at it; as he spoke he opened the lower part of the cupboard, pulled out a spotless cloth, and began to polish the glass.

  “Yes, please.”

  The Captain pushed a bell, meanwhile unlocking the upper cupboard and taking out a bottle of Black-and-White; when the boy tapped on the door he said, “Tell Andrews to bring some soda.”

  “He’s ashore, Sir.”

  “Is Mr. Harris on board?”

  “Yessir—I think so, Sir.”

  “Then tell him I want some soda, please.”

  “Yessir.”

  There was something about the slow formality of Captain Blyth’s manner of speaking to his ship’s company which was to impress Julia throughout the trip; it began to impress her that first evening when Mr. Harris, who was the chief steward, appeared and said apologetically that Andrews must have gone off with the keys, and he could only find one bottle of soda, which he had borrowed off Mr. Reeder. All Captain Blyth said was—“Thank you. Get some.”

  “In port, things slow down a bit. The men all like to get ashore, and of course drinks aren’t served till we get outside territorial waters,” he said, bringing the whisky and soda over to where Julia sat on one of the sofas, and setting them on a table fixed to the bulkhead at her side. “Now, tell me how you like this.”

  The time passed pleasantly—Julia’s lingering vexation gradually melted away under the Captain’s slow, cheerful chat. He had a flat, quiet manner and spoke in a gentle, flat voice. He himself liked gin, he said, proceeding to drink it; the agents in the ports mostly liked whisky, and you wouldn’t believe how much they would drink; moreover they liked to sit up all night, whereas he, himself, hated staying up late, unless he had to be on the bridge, which was a different thing. He expressed a courteous hope that Julia would be comfortable, and mentioned various people in Tangier who always came out on his ship—“come time after time, the Watsons do. He’s a nice man, Mr. Watson—and she’s nice, too.”

  Mr. Scales proved to be a very young man, to Julia’s surprise; when she was arranging her passage he had contrived on the telephone to sound almost paternal. When the boy announced him Captain Blyth said, “Oh, I must give you your pass,” in his soft voice, and sat down at his desk and unlocked a drawer—everything in his cabin seemed always to be being unlocked and locked again.

  “Pass? whatever for?” asked Julia curiously.

  “Can’t get into the docks at night without. There. Hope you enjoy yourself.” He came out with her along the deck to the gangway. “Sorry everything’s in a bit of a mess—clean up when we get to sea,” he said. “Don’t slip, now—that’s awkward, that gangway is.”

  It took Mr. Scales and his small car, caught up in the evening jam of westbound traffic from the City, rather a long time to transport Julia to the discreet club, mostly peopled by women twice her age, for which Mrs. Hathaway had put her up; Mr. Consett was waiting for her, the porter said. Unhurried, Julia went in and found him sitting in the big chintzy drawing-room, reading Antiquity.

  “I’m sorry I’m late—the traffic in the City was awful, and my penitent didn’t drive very well,” she said.

  “I’ve not been here long. Who is your penitent, and why?” asked Mr. Consett, locking Antiquity away in a black brief-case with the royal cypher on it.

  “A very incompetent young man—will you have whisky or a Martini?—A Martini and a tomato-juice, please,” said Julia to the severe elderly waitress, “and we’re not dining here.”

  “Goodness, Julia, what an ant-heap this place is!” Mr. Consett said in a lowered tone as the waitress moved away, glancing round at the other occupants of the room.

  “Well, yes. But the drinks are reasonably good.”

  “A very incompetent young man’ you were saying,” Mr. Consett prompted her.

  “Yes, in the shipping office.” She related Mr. Scales’s crime. Mr. Consett gazed at her indignantly.

  “In fact, you were going to slide off without so much as letting me know! What a Schweinhund you are, Julia.”

  “What is a Schweinhund?” asked Julia, sipping her tomato-juice—her languages did not extend to German.

  “A mixture of a cur and a swine,” said Mr. Consett measuredly. “No, really, Julia—you are monstrous.”

  “I was in such a rush,” she said, turning the dove’s rather than the cow’s eyes onto him. “I hadn’t a moment to see anyone, Geoffrey; truly I hadn’t. Fixing my newspapers, and the visas, and getting extra Travellers’ Cheques, and finding a boat to go on—you can’t think what an absolute scrum it’s been.”

  “Why Morocco, anyhow?” the young man asked. He was very tall; pallid, with thick fair hair, a square intellectual face, and pale blue eyes, he usually looked as severely detached from this world as a youthful St. John the Evangelist in an early Flemish predella.

  Julia explained the nature of her quest; Geoffrey Consett immediately became extremely un-detached.

  “What is this Colin? A boy-friend? Otherwise, why do you go hooshing off to find him in this completely wild-cat way? I never heard such rubbish.”

  “Oh, Geoffrey, don’t be a clot! People aren’t usually boyfriends in at all a heavy way if they go off for three years at a time, and never write. But in fact I’ve hardly seen anything of Colin since he was at Eton.”

  “Eton? What surname?”

  “Monro, you silly. He’s Aunt Ellen’s son. And I’m only going because Uncle John has gone and died, and Aunt Ellen is in such a fuss, and poor wretched Edina—who makes twice your salary, I may say—has got to stay and run Glentoran till someone can find Colin and make him come back and look after his own infernal estate. Not but what it’s a most darling place,” said Julia.

  “Colin Monro—yes, I remember him; he was in Merry-weather’s,” said Geoffrey, temporarily disregarding all but the Etonian aspect of Julia’s remarks. “A pig-headed creature.”

  “Oh, was he? Well, he’s a poor correspondent.”