The Wish House and Other Stories (74 page)

‘I’ve come back,’ Manallace interrupted, unsteadily. ‘I can confirm every word you’ve said. You’ve nothing to worry about. It’s
your
find –
your
credit –
your
glory and – all the rest of it.’

‘Swear you’ll tell her so then,’ said Castorley. ‘She doesn’t believe a word I say. She told me she never has since before we were married. Promise!’

Manallace promised, and Castorley added that he had named him his literary executor, the proceeds of the book to go to his wife. ‘All profits without deduction,’ he gasped. ‘Big sales if it’s properly handled.
You
don’t need money…Graydon’ll trust
you
to any extent. It ’ud be a long…’

He coughed, and, as he caught breath, his pain broke through all the drugs, and the outcry filled the room. Manallace rose to fetch Gleeag, when a full, high, affected voice, unheard for a generation, accompanied, as it seemed, the clamour of a beast in agony, saying: ‘I wish to God someone would stop that old swine howling there! I can’t…I was going to tell you fellows that it would be a dam’ long time before Graydon advanced
me
two quid.’

We escaped together, and found Gleeag waiting, with Lady Castorley, on the landing. He telephoned me, next morning, that Castorley had died of bronchitis, which his weak state made it impossible for him to throw off. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well,’ he added, in reply to the condolences I asked him to convey to the widow. ‘We might have come across something we couldn’t have coped with.’

Distance from that house made me bold.

‘You knew all along, I suppose? What was it, really?’

‘Malignant kidney-trouble – generalized at the end. No use
worrying him about it. We let him through as easily as possible. Yes! A happy release…What?…Oh! Cremation. Friday, at eleven.’

There, then, Manallace and I met. He told me that she had asked him whether the book need now be published; and he had told her this was more than ever necessary, in her interests as well as Castorley’s.

‘She is going to be known as his widow – for a while, at any rate. Did I perjure myself much with him?’

Not explicitly,’ I answered.

‘Well, I have now – with
her
– explicitly,’ said he, and took out his black gloves…

As, on the appointed words, the coffin crawled sideways through the noiselessly-closing door-flaps, I saw Lady Castorley’s eyes turn towards Gleeag.

(Modernized from the ‘Chaucer’ of Manallace.)

H
ER
cinnabar-tinted topsail, nicking the hot blue horizon, showed she was a Spanish wheat-boat hours before she reached Marseilles mole. There, her mainsail brailed itself, a spritsail broke out forward, and a handy driver aft; and she threaded her way through the shipping to her berth at the quay as quietly as a veiled woman slips through a bazaar.

The blare of her horns told her name to the port. An elderly hook-nosed inspector came aboard to see if her cargo had suffered in the run from the South, and the senior ship-cat purred round her captain’s legs as the after-hatch was opened.

‘If the rest is like this – ‘ the inspector sniffed – ‘you had better run out again to the mole and dump it.’

‘That’s nothing,’ the captain replied. ‘All Spanish wheat heats a little. They reap it very dry.’

‘Pity you don’t keep it so, then. What would you call
that –
crop or pasture?’

The inspector pointed downwards. The grain was in bulk, and deck-leakage, combined with warm weather, had sprouted it here and there in sickly green films.

‘So much the better,’ said the captain brazenly. ‘That makes it waterproof. Pare off the top two inches, and the rest is as sweet as a nut.’

‘I told that lie, too, when I was your age. And how does she happen to be loaded?’

The young Spaniard flushed, but kept his temper.

‘She happens to be ballasted, under my eye, on lead-pigs and bagged copper-ores.’

‘I don’t know that they much care for verdigris in their dole-bread at Rome. But – you were saying?’

‘I was trying to tell you that the bins happen to be grain-tight, two-inch chestnut, floored and sided with hides.’

‘Meaning dressed African leathers on your private account?’

‘What has that got to do with you? We discharge at Port of Rome, not here.’

‘So your papers show. And what might you have stowed in the wings of her?’

Oh, apes! Circumcised apes – just like you!’

‘Young monkey! Well, if you are not above taking an old ape’s advice, next time you happen to top off with wool and screw in more bales than are good for her, get your ship undergirt before you sail. I know it doesn’t look smart coming into Port of Rome, but it’ll save your decks from lifting worse than they are.’

There was no denying that the planking and waterways round the after-hatch had lifted a little. The captain lost his temper.

‘I know your breed!’ he stormed. ‘You promenade the quays all summer at Caesar’s expense, jamming your Jew-bow into everybody’s business; and when the norther blows, you squat over your brazier and let us skippers hang in the wind for a week!’

‘You have it! Just that sort of a man am I now,’ the other answered. ‘That’ll do, the quarter-hatch!’

As he lifted his hand the falling sleeve showed the broad gold armlet with the triple vertical gouges which is only worn by master mariners who have used all three seas – Middle, Western, and Eastern.

‘Gods!’ the captain saluted. ‘I thought you were—‘

‘A Jew, of course. Haven’t you used Eastern ports long enough to know a Red Sidonian when you see one?’

‘Mine the fault – yours be the pardon, my father!’ said the Spaniard impetuously. ‘Her topsides
are
a trifle strained. There was a three days’ blow coming up. I meant to have had her undergirt off the Islands, but hawsers slow a ship so – and one hates to spoil a good run.’

‘To whom do you say it?’ The inspector looked the young man over between horny sun and salt creased eyelids like a brooding pelican. ‘But if you care to get up your girt-hawsers tomorrow, I can find men to put ’em overside. It’s no work for open sea. Now! Main-hatch, there!…I thought so. She’ll need another girt abaft the foremast.’ He motioned to one of his staff, who hurried up the quay to where the port guard-boat basked at her mooring-ring. She was a stoutly-built, single-banker, eleven a side, with a short punching ram; her duty being to stop riots in harbour and piracy along the coast.

‘Who commands her?’ the captain asked.

‘An old shipmate of mine, Sulinus – a River man. We’ll get his opinion.’

In the Mediterranean (Nile keeping always her name) there is but
one river – that shifty-mouthed Danube, where she works through her deltas into the Black Sea. Up went the young man’s eyebrows.

‘Is he any kin to a Sulinor of Tomi, who used to be in the flesh-traffic – and a Free Trader? My uncle has told me of him. He calls him Mango.’

That man. He was my second in the wheat-trade my last five voyages, after the Euxine grew too hot to hold him. But he’s in the Fleet now…You know your ship best. Where do you think the after-girts ought to come?’

The captain was explaining, when a huge dish-faced Dacian, in short naval cuirass, rolled up the gangplank, carefully saluting the bust of Caesar on the poop, and asked the captain’s name.

‘Baeticus, for choice,’ was the answer.

They all laughed, for the sea, which Rome mans with foreigners, washes out many shore-names.

‘My trouble is this—‘ Baeticus began, and they went into committee, which lasted a full hour. At the end, he led them to the poop, where an awning had been stretched, and wines set out with fruits and sweet shore water.

They drank to the Gods of the Sea, Trade, and Good Fortune, spilling those small cups overside, and then settled at ease.

‘Girting’s an all-day job, if it’s done properly,’ said the inspector. ‘Can you spare a real working-party by dawn tomorrow, Mango?’

‘But surely – for you, Red.’

‘I’m thinking of the wheat,’ said Quabil curtly. He did not like nicknames so early.

‘Full meals
and
drinks,’ the Spanish captain put in.

‘Good! Don’t return ’em too full. By the way’ – Sulinor lifted a level cup – ‘where do you get this liquor, Spaniard?’

‘From our Islands (the Balearics). Is it to your taste?’

‘It is.’ The big man unclasped his gorget in solemn preparation.

Their talk ran professionally, for though each end of the Mediterranean scoffs at the other, both unite to mock landward, wooden-headed Rome and her stiff-jointed officials.

Sulinor told a tale of taking the prefect of the port, on a breezy day, to Forum Julii, to see a lady, and of his lamentable condition when landed.

‘Yes,’ Quabil sneered. ‘Rome’s mistress of the world – as far as the foreshore.’

‘If Caesar ever came on patrol with me,’ said Sulinor, ‘he might understand there was such a thing as the Fleet.’

‘Then he’d officer it with well-born young Romans,’ said Quabil.
‘Be grateful you are left alone.
You
are the last man in the world to want to see Caesar.’

‘Except one,’ said Sulinor, and he and Quabil laughed.

‘What’s the joke?’ the Spaniard asked.

Sulinor explained.

‘We had a passenger, our last trip together, who wanted to see Caesar. It cost us our ship and freight. That’s all.’

‘Was he a warlock – a wind-raiser?’

Only a Jew philosopher. But he
had
to see Caesar. He said he had; and he piled up the
Eirene
on his way.’

‘Be fair,’ said Quabil. ‘I don’t like the Jews – they lie too close to my own hold – but it was Caesar lost me my ship.’ He turned to Baeticus. ‘There was a proclamation, our end of the world, two seasons back, that Caesar wished the Eastern wheat-boats to run through the winter, and he’d guarantee all loss. Did
you
get it, youngster.

‘No. Our stuff is all in by September. I wager Caesar never paid you! How late did you start?’

‘I left Alexandria across the bows of the Equinox – well down in the pickle, with Egyptian wheat – half pigeon’s dung – and the usual load of Greek sutlers and their women. The second day out the sou’-wester caught me. I made across it north for the Lycian coast, and slipped into Myra till the wind should let me get back into the regular grain-track again.’

Sailor-fashion, Quabil began to illustrate his voyage with date and olive stones from the table.

‘The wind went into the north, as I knew it would, and I got under way. You remember, Mango? My anchors were apeak when a Lycian patrol threshed in with Rome’s order to us to wait on a Sidon packet with prisoners and officers. Mother of Carthage, I cursed him!’

‘Shouldn’t swear at Rome’s Fleet. ‘Weatherly craft, those Lycian racers! Fast, too. I’ve been hunted by them! Never thought I’d command one,’ said Sulinor, half aloud.

‘And now I’m coming to the leak in
my
decks, young man,’ Quabil eyed Baeticus sternly. ‘Our slant north had strained her, and I should have undergirt her at Myra. Gods know why I didn’t! I set up the chain-staples in the cable-tier for the prisoners. I even had the girt-hawsers on deck – which saved time later; but the thing I should have done, that I did
not.’

‘Luck of the Gods!’ Sulinor laughed. ‘It was because our little philosopher wanted to see Caesar in his own way at our expense.’

‘Why did he want to see him?’ said Baeticus.

‘As far as I ever made out from him and the centurion, he wanted to argue with Caesar – about philosophy.’

‘He was a prisoner, then?’

‘A political suspect – with a Jew’s taste for going to law,’ Quabil interrupted. ‘No orders for irons. Oh, a little shrimp of a man, but-but he seemed to take it for granted that he led everywhere. He messed with us.’

‘And he was worth talking to, Red,’ said Sulinor.

‘You
thought so; but he had the woman’s trick of taking the tone and colour of whoever he talked to. Now – as I was saying…’

There followed another illustrated lecture on the difficulties that beset them after leaving Myra. There was always too much west in the autumn winds, and the
Eirene
tacked against it as far as Cnidus. Then there came a northerly slant, on which she ran through the Aegean Islands, for the tail of Crete; rounded that, and began tacking up the south coast.

‘Just darning the water again, as we had done from Myra to Cnidus,’ said Quabil ruefully. ‘I daren’t stand out. There was the boneyard of all the Gulf of Africa under my lee. But at last we worked into Fairhaven – by that cork yonder. Late as it was, I should have taken her on, but I had to call a ship-council as to lying up for the winter. That Rhodian law may have suited open boats and cock-crow coasters,
^*
but it’s childish for ocean-traffic’