Appleby on Ararat (2 page)

Mrs Kittery, the quiet young man thought, had shifted uneasily in her seat. But perhaps she was only going to negotiate for another soft drink. Perhaps – The military person had abandoned the
Times
and was studying something in a magazine. Now he looked up at Mrs Kittery. “Comical colonial bear in five letters,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Comical colonial bear in five letters. Begins with a
k
.”

“Koala. But it’s silly.” Mrs Kittery had risen.

“Silly?”

“To call a koala a comical colonial bear. It’s silly and stupid.”

Mrs Kittery spoke as one who suddenly knows that it is necessary to be heard. So it was almost a scene. They stared at her uncomprehendingly, much perplexed.

“And we don’t keep half-fed animals in zoos. Or eat soap or pretend to be New Zealand. We don’t–”

Mr Hoppo extended professional hands before him. “Badinage, my dear Mrs Kittery,” he said. “A sultry morning, the tedium of our voyage – and a little badinage results. Colonel Glover was only–”

“Stuff and nonsense, sir – and be so good as to let me speak for myself.” The military person had tossed down his magazine. “Badinage my foot! Counterjumpers’ talk, sir. If the lady thinks the description of this animal offensive she’s entitled to say so. Remember a fellow once called a capital retriever of mine a dear dumb friend. Respect the feeling. Don’t Colonel-Glover-was-only me, sir.”

Mr Hoppo squared himself in his chair. “I only proposed–”

“Ptscha!” said Colonel Glover.

Miss Curricle put her book under her arm and rose. “I can only withdraw. One scarcely expects English gentlemen–”

“Rubbish!” said Mr Hoppo and Colonel Glover together.

“I do think you all exceedingly odd!” said Mrs Kittery.

“Odd!” Mr Hoppo suddenly shouted. “And was it not you, madam, and your bear that first–”

“Moderate your voice, sir,” said Colonel Glover; “moderate your voice in the presence of ladies.”

“Sir,” said Mr Hoppo, “you may keep your prescriptions for your parade ground.”

“Disgraceful!” said Miss Curricle, a little shrill. “Dis-
grace
-ful!”

The quiet young man sighed a quiet but – as it seemed – oddly compelling sigh. For there was a moment’s silence. And in the silence a new voice spoke from the door.

“Excuse?” it said politely.

The black man’s voice. And this made it very awkward – like a scene conducted before servants but with certain imponderables added. Because the black man was not a servant; carried most easily about with him, indeed, the air of being a master on the largest scale. Had he been an Indian it would have been easier. Colonel Glover knew all about Indians – all about the proper relations with the different kinds in different places – which, after all, is all that there is to know. Colonel Glover had sometimes explained how the same Indian must not be regarded as quite the same Indian in different places; in a presidency, in a native state, on a ship going from England to India, or from India to England, or – as in this case – not from or to India at all. But about this black man Colonel Glover had confessed to not knowing the rules; Asiatics and Eurasians, he had said, were after all a considerable field in themselves and one could scarcely know about Africans too. Actually, he believed, the position was very simple –
very
simple. Still, there might be exceptions – special cases of which this conceivably was one. The First Officer – who was Irish and probably irresponsible – had sworn the fellow possessed a diplomatic passport. The Captain declared him to be a missionary. Irreconcilable statements these, and the first extremely improbable. Though with Halifax at the FO one never knew. Anyway here he was, a vast creature who seemed to carry the music of tom-toms faintly about with him, pushing in to wolf a sherbet. And this scene going on.

“Excuse?” said the black man.

It is not customary to ask permission to step into a sun-deck café for a sherbet. The black man therefore was thrusting the colour problem forward. His voice, rich and grave, might proceed from a vast lake of simplicity or from a well of irony equally vast. The idiom was un-English and deliberate; the accent was Eton and apparently spontaneous. And he moved among the littered tables like a mighty hunter. Mrs Kittery was plainly vividly aware of him. Colonel Glover coughed, attempted speech, faltered, coughed again like a faulty engine achieving a second start. “Nice morning,” he said. “But a bit on the humid side.”

The black man – might he be a Zulu? – brilliantly smiled. “I like it moist,” he said – and his voice was as the Society for Pure English speaking through a magnifying and deepening machine. “Do you know where I often make for in London? The acclimatisation house at the zoo.”

“The acclimatisation house!” Miss Curricle was startled.

The black man bowed. “Among the gorillas,” he said gravely. And taking a deep breath he raised both arms and drummed unobtrusively on his chest.

Miss Curricle involuntarily gathered her skirts about her, as if envisaging the instant necessity of dodging behind a tree. “It must be a great change,” she said vaguely. “London, I mean. After – after your part of the world.”

Mr Hoppo made a large gesture at the ocean. “Do you,” he asked with cordiality, “know the Pacific well?”

The black man did not immediately reply, and they all looked out, as if some survey of the beating waters might help him to an answer. The horizon, very remote from this height, swayed rhythmically up and down, a faintly serrated line between blues. It enclosed emptiness and the ceaseless impotent friction of the waters. No one could know the Pacific, and perhaps the black man’s momentary silence implied as much. “Only a small corner,” he said. “I have done some work in the Tamota group.”

“Ah,” said Mr Hoppo, and his voice took on a new tone. “How wide the field! And how few–”

“I am an anthropologist.”

“Indeed!” Mr Hoppo, abandoning his professional voice, contorted his features into a fair representation of the incisiveness of the scientist. “An absorbing study, sir.”

“There were some fascinating things there. They would interest you, I believe.”

“I am sure of it.” Mr Hoppo spoke without certainty.

“There is one incarnation myth in particular–”

“Ah!” Mr Hoppo began to peer about him. “I wonder where I can have left–”

“Mr Hoppo,” said Miss Curricle, “is a clergyman.” She spoke with a severity which ambiguity rendered formidable. “I am a good deal interested myself–”

Mrs Kittery interrupted. Her eyes, the quiet young man noted, had been widening upon the newcomer as he rather wished they would widen on him; now he spoke at her most eager. “About that zoo,” she asked; “that zoo in London. Would you say they feed the animals as they ought?”

“No.” He was looking at her without complicity or surprise, but there was a remote and understanding mischief in his voice; perhaps, the young man thought, he had an extra and primitive sense or two tucked away. “No. In point of strict diatetics it may be sound enough. But the tastes of the creatures are inadequately consulted. Take the hippopotamus: the hippopotamus must have mangoes.”

“The hippopotamuses always have mangoes in Australia,” said Mrs Kittery, and paused to garner a displeased sound from Miss Curricle. “And custard-apples – is that right?” She was looking up with great innocence into the black man’s eyes.

“Perfectly right,” said the black man. He looked quickly at Colonel Glover, who had menacingly coughed. “In moderation, of course.”

“Of course.” Mrs Kittery offered the black man potato crisps, and at this Mr Hoppo coughed too. “Do you know,” she said suddenly, “I’ve just thought of the title of a book?”

“Indeed?” enquired Mr Hoppo, and made disapproving faces behind the black man’s back. “It would scarcely have occurred to me that you were an authoress.”

“I’m not. But sometimes I like to think of books it would be fun to write.” Mrs Kittery’s remarks were now addressed with frankly wanton concentration to the black man only. “This one is the result” – she hesitated for a phrase – “of the association of ideas. Is that right?”

The black man laughed, and his laugh like his accent was at once correct and disturbingly alive. “I can’t tell,” he said, “–until I know the title.”

“It’s–” Mrs Kittery collapsed into mirth. “It’s–” She collapsed again. “It’s
Mr Hoppo’s Hippo
.” And she laughed the quick clear laugh of one who enjoys great simplicity of mind.

Because there would be incivility in either laughter or a stony face, the black man smiled. He smiled at the now almost contiguous Mrs Kittery. And his smile, perhaps because it had a richness and an otherness that matched his voice, was too much for Colonel Glover. The proprieties of Poona, the convictions of Kuala-Lumpur, rose in him. “A British lady–” he began, and paused upon finding the quiet young man planted squarely in his path.

“Quite an Imperial occasion,” said the young man cheerfully. “We only want a convinced Irishman and harmony would be complete.”

There was an uncertain silence.

“The sun never sets on us. So at least it can’t go down upon our wrath.” He laughed swiftly, rather as one draws children to laugh at nothing very much. “I think,” he added inconsequently, “I see the bugler just starting on his round.”

“Um.” Colonel Glover looked awkwardly at his watch. “One o’clock.”

“Luncheon,” said Mr Hoppo, still rather pink from digesting his hippo. “One had no idea.”

Miss Curricle rose. “The sky and the sea,” she said magnificently, “are miraculously blue.”

“But I really believe” – Mr Hoppo roguishly beamed – “that the sky has it, after all.”

“No: I must admit that the sea–”

“And it’s all so peaceful,” said Mrs Kittery. “Nothing, perhaps, within a hundred miles. It’s all so” – she searched for an enormous word – “so inviolate.”

“‘Compass’d by the inviolate sea,’” said Mr Hoppo in the special voice of clergymen when they are making a cultural reference.

“Dear Lord Tennyson,” said Miss Curricle, unconsciously quoting, perhaps, words which had impressed her nursery years.

“Peaceful,” said Colonel Glover. “That’s it. Utterly peaceful. We’re right out of it. That’s what’s so strange. So out of it that one can hardly believe in it. That’s what’s so dashed odd.”

There was a pause in which they looked at one another soberly. Then Mr Hoppo spoke from the side. “Miss Curricle, I can see a whale.”

Miss Curricle almost archly smiled. “Now, Mr Hoppo–”

But Mr Hoppo was frowning. “At least I
think
–”

And at this moment it happened. The ship shivered. The universe turned to a gigantic runaway lift. To that and to one vast explosion deep in the heart of which could be heard the tiny tinkle of broken cocktail glasses.

Mr Hoppo had not seen a whale.

“The wise men of Gotham found themselves in a not dissimilar situation.” As she enunciated this Miss Curricle slithered cautiously on the plate-glass and curiously regarded the depths below. “There is nothing in sight?”

The black man, perched hazardously on the ruins of the bar, shook his head. “
Od’ und leer das Meer
.”

“You could scarcely have recourse to a less suitable language.”

“The wise men of Gotham presumably spoke it.”

“Would anyone care,” Mr Hoppo asked, “for a Gilded Lady or a Raspberry Spider?”

The sun-deck café – except that it had turned upside down – was much as it had been. But the liner of which it had formed so inconsiderable a part was gone, and – wrenched away – the café floated grotesquely upon an empty ocean under an empty sky. Angry and oddly exalted, the six people left above water had established a tone which was civilised and dry. It was like a hastily-rigged emotional jury-mast. Each no doubt wondered for how long it would serve.

Colonel Glover was making a tour of inspection. “One heard some odd effects of high explosive in Spain,” he said. “Fellows blown on the roofs of churches and left to cling there unharmed. That sort of thing. But nothing quite so deuced odd as this.” He poked at the structure beneath him. “The frame is chrome steel and the glass inch-thick and bedded in rubber, so it’s strong enough. Rides nicely, too. Trim her a bit, though, with advantage. Hoppo, just shift that case of Vichy-Celestins a bit to starboard – beside Mr–”

“Appleby,” said the quiet young man.

“Appleby. Glover’s my name. Lancers.”

“CID.”

Colonel Glover blinked in the seeping sunshine. “Beg pardon?”

“A policeman.”

“Bless my soul. Most unexpected. Precious little traffic to direct hereabouts, I’m afraid.” Colonel Glover chuckled doubtfully and his eye searched the horizon – perhaps for social bearings. “Happen to know my nephew, Rupert Ounce?”

“He was my assistant last year.”

“Ah.” Glover was relieved. “Well, now we all know each other. Except–” He glanced upwards at the black man.

“Unumunu,” said the black man gravely.

“Mr Unumunu.”

On a large square of plate-glass Mrs Kittery was lying on her stomach, watching small fishes darting an inch beneath her nose. Now she turned round on her back. “But perhaps you are a prince?” she asked.

The black man smiled brilliantly. “Once upon a time, as it happens, I was a king. And after that I was knighted. I am Sir Ponto Unumunu.”

“Sir Ponto!” said Colonel Glover, startled. “I once had–” He checked himself.

“In my language Ponto means ‘circumspect in battle.’ It is not perhaps a very good name for a knight who is now commonly one who has been circumspect in trade. Miss Curricle, here I think is a comfortable chair.”

“Thank you, Sir Ponto.”

On curves of steel, on strips of vivid red leather, Miss Curricle swayed upon the Pacific Ocean. It was calm with only the deep sea swell; the waters were like a vast big dipper, flattened out and slowed down for a wealthy cardiac patient; the sky held a blue as hard as bronze; the sun stood absolute in its heaven. The inverted dome of the café thrust down into the unknown element – a dream aquarium against which the wandering sharks and devil-fish might press curious noses, wondering at the spidery-limbed creatures within.