Appleby on Ararat (15 page)

Heaven bowed to Diana, turned round, gathered up his belongings and moved away. And as his head dipped below the barrow the swallows were silent, the cattle gave themselves to rest, the faint thunder faded on the air.

“Curious,” said Appleby, as he and Diana walked back to the hotel. “Curious about that caviare. Do you remember the black spot in
Treasure Island
? It was something like that – notice to the enemy of what’s coming to him. And I suppose you might describe caviare as the black blob. Heaven hands Hailstone the black blob. Curious, indeed.” He spoke spasmodically, his glance moving restlessly over the beach before them.

The tide was withdrawing, leaving behind it a fresh myriad of tiny shells and, interspersed among these, thousands of dun fibrous balls of varying sizes – a barren fruit of the sea tumbled out as earnest of the bizarre world of the Tonga Trench. One of these Diana stooped like Atalanta to gather as she moved: light as thistledown and as solid-looking as a tennis ball it lay in her hand. “It wasn’t only caviare sandwiches,” she said carefully; “it was sandwich paper too. Perhaps what he was threatening to pass on to you was that. Not so much black spot or black blob as blackmail. You could have your sandwiches ready wrapped up in some threatening paper–”

He had stopped and was looking at her with honest admiration. “Did you see the paper? I didn’t spot anything unusual about it.”

“I saw the edges. It looked like a good sandwich paper – rather thick. But yellower. John, it might have been something
old
. The stuff called–”

“Parchment.”

“Yes. An old document, a plan, a – a chart.”

He laughed – but not with much satisfaction. “
Treasure Island
again. And it is that. Jack and Ernest and the good pastor are out of date.” Again he looked restlessly about him. “I wish I could see that conveniently impregnable stockade. I wish we could dump you in an apple-barrel, Diana, and really hear what’s what.” He shook his head. “But an old chart doesn’t fit, all the same… One could have a tropical version of a snow fight with these.” He kicked one of the largest of the fibrous balls vigorously towards the sea.

“I should have thought an old chart was just right.” Diana was disappointed. “But, if it worries you, do you think it would be possible to – to extort it from Heaven? I shouldn’t imagine he has much guts.”

“Perhaps not. And I dare say we could. Only the situation is rather delicate, isn’t it? Here we are living on credit in his hotel, and with only the vaguest notion of when we shall get away.”

Diana nodded sagaciously. “Yes,” she said, “perhaps it’s not just the time to give him the works. He has a yacht, it seems, but nobody knows when it’s likely to be coming back… And that reminds me. Something Dunchue said I was to tell you. Something he had remembered, he said, after all. About poor Pongo. Ponto, I mean.” She looked momentarily contrite. “How quickly one forgets about people when they’re dead.”

“What did Dunchue remember?”

“Not much. When Heaven’s yacht was in the captain asked Dunchue on board. They had a great big radio – what nobody has here – that could pick up ordinary stuff from all over the place. And he remembers something about Ponto Unumunu from Cape Town. He can’t remember what, but he thinks it was something to do with Kimberley… Is that a place?”

“Yes.” Appleby pursed his lips as if in half a mind to whistle. “Anything else?”

“Only that he only remembers at all because of something about somebody.”

“Dear me.”

“It does seem vague. He rather thinks it was that desperately wicked-looking man at the hotel. Poulish – Sir Something Poulish. He seems to remember that when there was this about Ponto Unumunu on the radio the man Poulish – who was there too, you see – was upset. And that’s all he remembers. It’s very little, isn’t it?”

Appleby shook his head. “I can almost see it as being a shade too much. Particularly when I reflect on George.”

“On the hound of the Hailstones?”

He nodded and walked on some paces. “You may think of George,” he continued gravely, “as the merest decorative flourish – something to patter quaintly through the interspersed vacancies of our ragged adventures. Nothing, Diana, could be more fatally mistaken. Saint Francis preached to the Georges – but this George holds sermons for
me
.” He looked at her and burst out laughing. “The Duke of Monmouth was betrayed by his George – it was in his breeches pocket, they say – but this George–”

“John, I think you in-insufferable. I don’t know anything about the Duke of Monmouth. But if he carried a dog in his breeches pocket I think it was most unaristocratic and smelly.”

And Diana dived at the littered sea-fruit at her feet and pelted him. But Appleby, heedless, was shouting with laughter – a strange behaviour in a policeman even when he feels himself on a trail, and one to be accounted for only by the stimulus of an exotic environment. And then he was striding rapidly ahead. “Diana” – most unjustly he called back over his shoulder – “stop fooling around. There’s work to do.” He moved on, stopped, waited – and she found him looking at the island with eyes almost as round as her own would go. “And I’m hungry. I could even eat those bonzer worms.” He was laughing at her again, and as happy as if the world were suddenly young. “Too right, Diana – I could. Too right.”

Mr Mudge, the handyman of the Hermitage Hotel, had a hut of his own on a slight eminence above the native servants’ quarters. This made possible a surveillance to which, as a duty, he did not appear to take kindly – or so Appleby conjectured from his conversation when visited before dinner that evening. Mudge was preparing to immerse himself in a shower; he removed a white coat and looked dubiously at his visitor until assured that there was no ceremony; he began to remove a singlet and interrupted the operation to shake a gloomy head. “No morals, Mr Appleby,” he said, “no morals at all.” He shed the singlet and revealed a chest on which was tattooed a sort of popular version of the Medici Venus. “Lecherous as monkeys, sir – and none of the ways you’d think to stop them is any good whatever. Over there’s a kind of dormitory for the gels, sir, and on the other side one for the lads. It worked for a time, and mighty surprised and sulky they were. But now” – he thrust his torso beneath an impending bucket and groped for a string – “well, irrelevant would be the word, sir, if you follow what I mean.”

“Ah,” said Appleby.

“And no idea of monogamy, Mr Appleby – none at all. With the visitors, of course, one expects that sort of thing. But when the natives turn out as bad or worse – well, sir, it begins to prey on the mind. Makes one think, if you follow me, Mr Appleby.”

“It does, indeed,” said Appleby. “Let me pull that string.”

“Thank you, sir. Slow and steady, if you will be so kind. We had a bazaar for Moral Welfare a little time back – but it didn’t go through in the right spirit, I’m sorry to say.” Mudge turned round and revealed across his spine what might have passed as an incident in the story of Daphnis and Chloe. “The truth is, Mr Appleby, that tropical residence relaxes the moral fibres. Stern and true and tender is the North. With the South it’s different. And never the twain should meet. You’ll excuse a taste for the poetic, sir. It seems to come natural to a contemplative man. Would you ever have read Wordsworth’s
Excursion
, now?”

“Yes.”

“I’m delighted to hear it, Mr Appleby. There’s a great deal of contemplation there. I often take it down of an evening. But nobody else on the island seems to know it. I hope we may have some conversation, sir, from time to time. Would you ever have read Blair’s
Grave
?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Ah.” Mudge was disappointed. “Or Young’s
Night Thoughts
? Very meditative, Mr Appleby; very meditative indeed.”

“No – or only bits in anthologies.”

“Well, they’re at your service on the shelf, sir, at any time. And I’d venture to say that if you relish the
Excursion
you couldn’t go far wrong with the others. A comfort, I find them, in our present restricted society. Thank you, Mr Appleby, the striped towel.”

Daphnis and Chloe, and the delicately posed Venus, were vigorously rubbed in turn. Appleby let a minute pass before asking: “Are they all of a piece, Mr Mudge – the white folk, I mean? That moral fibre: is it about equally relaxed all round?”

This was a nice question which Mudge clearly relished. “Well now, I think it’s a matter of residence, as I say. Not that they don’t all arrive from the start with equally frivolous ends, Mr Appleby – no apprehension that life is earnest, none at all. But somehow there’s a bit more sense to them when they first land than later on. Take Mr Jenner, for instance.”

“Ah,” said Appleby quickly. “The man who kicked George.”

“No doubt, sir. Well, Mr Jenner hasn’t been so long here as some; he came with the second lot. And I would say there was sense in Mr Jenner.”

“He does sensible things? Talks sensibly?”

Mudge shook his head. “No, Mr Appleby, I wouldn’t say that. Nothing so extreme as that, sir. He just looks as if he might have something sensible in his head, if you follow me.”

“I see.” Appleby’s expression had grown sombre. “He might be a man of rational purpose, whereas the others seem to be without any plan for themselves?”

“Just that – and very choicely put, sir, if I may say so. But I wouldn’t confine it just to Mr Jenner. There’s one or two others of the second batch that one has the same feel of. To speak figuratively, Mr Appleby, they might have something up their sleeves – something more, that’s to say, than ignoble ease. Not natural-born lotus-eaters; not just the kind to choose the cycle of Cathay. Having a taste for rhyme, Mr Appleby, you will catch the allusions.”

Appleby had begun to fill a pipe with Mr Heaven’s excellent tobacco. Now he put it away. “Mr Mudge,” he asked abruptly, “are you an honest man?”

Mudge looked unoffended; he also looked doubtful. “It’s really hard to say. On earth the broken arc, Mr Appleby; one can’t speak with complete conviction of one’s own moral nature. But, guardedly speaking, I should say Yes.”

“And well-affected to His Majesty the King?”

This time Mudge was startled – but emphatic. “Decidedly, Mr Appleby. I might define my position as royalist in politics – very definitely so. And might I ask–”

“We keep doubtful company here, Mr Mudge, and ought to be sure of each other. I shan’t say more at present. But believe me I’m not taking up your time just out of curiosity. And I have one or two more questions to ask – do you mind?”

Mudge slipped the Daphnis, the Chloe, the Venus beneath the cover of a fresh singlet. His features when they emerged from this operation were round-eyed and eager. “Mr Appleby, I think there may be profit in this. Anything you like.”

“First, then, how did you hitch up with your present employers?”

“It was at Pago-Pago – and it happened because the mate of the tanker I had been on was a philosophical man.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes, Mr Appleby, a man of philosophical inclinations. We used to discuss metaphysical problems together from time to time. Only his position, I am sorry to say, was very unsound – very unsound indeed, Mr Appleby. A solipsist, neither more nor less. Believe me, nothing would convince that man that anything existed outside his own head. At times it made me fair wild. Until one day, sir – and in the heat of argument, you will understand – it occurred to me that there could be no better argument than some sudden and acute physical stimulus from without.”

“I see.”

“He took it badly, I am sorry to say; he said he had never been kicked by a quartermaster before. So at Pago-Pago I left the ship in somewhat irregular circumstances. Perhaps awkward circumstances wouldn’t be too strong a phrase. And then I met Mr Heaven. The hotel had been built then, and he was collecting his guests.”

“Where from – and in what way? Do you know?”

But Mudge, for an intelligent man, knew surprisingly little. It appeared that he had just then come into possession of Dr Armstrong’s celebrated poem
The Art of Preserving Health
, and that he had accepted a job and subsequently sailed with the Heavens in an abstraction occasioned by a concentrated perusal of this masterpiece. And like many men of poetical or philosophical inclination he had little awareness of money; on the finances of the Hermitage Hotel and its guests he had only the vaguest ideas. But it was clear that the privilege of residence must be costly: the place had been put up with labour and materials brought from a great distance; somewhere Mr Heaven supported a yacht; the number of guests envisaged had originally been very small.

Appleby seized on this last point. “Smaller than now – I mean without Colonel Glover and the rest of us? There was a second batch of people – do you think they were not originally reckoned upon?”

“I don’t think they were entirely a surprise, Mr Appleby. It was just, perhaps, a bigger recruitment than the Heavens had expected at the time.”

“I see. And including Jenner, who kicked George and is not a natural-born lotus-eater. Now, Mr Mudge, another thing. About Sir Mervyn Poulish. Once, when the yacht was in, Sir Mervyn happened to be on board when a radio programme from Cape Town announced something about a Sir Ponto Unumunu and Kimberley. It disturbed him. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Nothing at all, Mr Appleby.”

“I hardly expected it to.” Appleby had turned round and was looking out across the swift tropical dusk. “There’s something horribly unprotected about that hotel.”

In a line of windows before them lights were going up behind the fly-wire and glass; at the farthest of these a fat woman, partially dressed, could be seen dabbing powder on her neck; the eye, shifting a fraction from this prosaic exhibit, fell on a stealthily encroaching wilderness of creeper and fern – a confusion of sombre and vivid greens now blending into a single dark background for scarlet flowers which, like opening wounds, grew more clamant as they looked.

Above, the palms had shed their contours and flattened themselves against the sky, fragile as silhouettes from the scissors of a Georgian lady which the turn of time has thrown against some vast construction of dully polished steel.