A lascar took down from a line some washing which had been flapping there all day.
The wash of the ship was quickly lost in the high waves.
They were steaming westward down the Channel.
As it grew to be night, lighthouses appeared flashing from the French coast.
Presently a steward walked round the bright, upper deck striking chimes on a gong of brass cylinders and the genial passenger went below to prepare himself for dinner in hot sea water which splashed from side to side of the bath and dissolved the soap in a thin, sticky scum.
He was the only man to dress that evening.
Tony sat in the mustering darkness until the second bell.
Then he left his greatcoat in the cabin and went down to dinner.
It was the first evening at sea.
Tony sat at the captain's table, but the captain was on the bridge that evening.
There were empty chairs on either side of him.
It was not rough enough for the fiddles to be out, but the stewards had removed the flower vases and damped the table-cloth to make it adhesive.
A coloured archdeacon sat facing him.
He ate with great refinement but his black hands looked immense on the wet, whitish cloth.
“I'm afraid our table is not showing up very well tonight,” he said. “I see you are not a sufferer.
My wife is in her cabin.
She is a sufferer.”
He was returning from a Congress, he told Tony.
At the top of the stairs was a lounge named the Music and Writing Room.
The light here was always subdued, in the day by the stained glass of the windows; at night by pink silk shades which hid the electric candles.
Here the passengers assembled for their coffee, sitting on bulky, tapestry covered chesterfields or on swivel chairs irremovably fastened before the writing tables.
Here too the steward for an hour every day presided over the cupboardful of novels which constituted the ship's library.
“It's not much of a boat,” said the genial passenger, sitting himself beside Tony. “But I expect things will look brighter when we get into the sun.”
Tony lit a cigar and was told by a steward that be must not smoke in this room.
“That's all right,” said the genial passenger, “we're just going down to the bar.”
“You know,” he said a few minutes later, “I feel I owe you an apology.
I thought you were potty just now before dinner. Honestly I did, when you said you were going to Demerara to look for a city. Well it sounded pretty potty.
Then the purser — I'm at his table. Always get the cheeriest crowd at the purser's table and the best attention — the purser told me about you.
You're the explorer aren't you?”
“Yes, come to think of it, I suppose I am,” said Tony.
It did not come easily to him to realize that he was an explorer.
It was barely a fortnight ago that he had become one.
Even the presence in the hold of two vast crates, bearing his name and labelled NOT WANTED ON THE VOYAGE — crates containing such new and unfamiliar possessions as a medicine chest, an automatic shot gun, camping equipment, pack saddles, a cinema camera, dynamite, disinfectants, a collapsible canoe, filters, tinned butter and, strangest of all, an assortment of what Dr. Messinger called `trade goods' — failed to convince him fully of the serious nature of his expedition.
Dr. Messinger had arranged everything.
It was he who chose the musical boxes and mechanical mice, the mirrors, combs, perfumery, pills, fish-hooks, axe-heads, coloured rockets, and rolls of artificial silk, which were packed in the box of `trade goods.'
And Dr. Messinger himself was a new acquaintance who, prostrate now in his bunk with what the Negro clergyman would have called `suffering,' that day, for the first time since Tony had met him, seemed entirely human.
Tony had spent very little of his life abroad.
At the age of eighteen, before going to the University, he had been boarded for the summer with an elderly gentleman near Tours, with the intention that he should learn the language. (… a grey stone house surrounded by vines.
There was a stuffed spaniel in the bathroom.
The old man had called it `Stop' because it was chic at that time to give dogs an English name.
Tony had bicycled along straight, white roads to visit the chateaux; he carried rolls of bread and cold veal tied to the back of the machine, and the soft dust seeped into them through the paper and gritted against his teeth.
There were two other English boys there, so he had learned little French.
One of them fell in love and the other got drunk for the first time on sparkling Vouvray at a fair that had been held in the town.
That evening Tony won a live pigeon at a tombola; he set it free and later saw it being recaptured by the proprietor of the stall with a butterfly net …) Later he had gone to central Europe for a few weeks with a friend from Balliol. (They had found themselves suddenly rich with the falling mark and had lived in unaccustomed grandeur in the largest hotel suites.
Tony had bought a fur for a few shillings and given it to a girl in Munich who spoke no English.) Later still his honeymoon with Brenda in a villa, lent to them, on the Italian Riviera. (… cypress and olive trees, a donned church half way down the hill, between the villa and the harbour, a cafe where they sat out in the evening, watching the fishing boats and the lights reflected in the quiet water, waiting for the sudden agitation of sound and motion as the speed boat came in.
It had been owned by a dashing young official, who called it JAZZ GIRL.
He seemed to spend twenty hours a day running in and out of the little harbour …) Once Brenda and he had gone to Le Touquet with Brat's golf team.
That was all.
After his father died he had not left England.
They could not easily afford it; it was one of the things they postponed until death duties were paid off; besides that, he was never happy away from Hetton and Brenda did not like leaving John Andrew.