Tales of Adventurers (14 page)

Yet now, twenty years later, here he was among these careless, loose-jointed boys and men, off to war with the first party of the professionals.
Followed their mercenary calling and took
their wages and are dead
– that was one of the bits he would chant in his imperial solitude. And he was proud of himself. At fifty-five it wasn’t so bad to have completed the
journey and shared the hardships, such as they were, without feeling one penny the worse – except that, God, he couldn’t endure many more hours without a drink!

Dusk fell. The blind turrets lifted their guns like the antennae of insects feeling for the night, and fired blank charges. The professionals jumped, and for a moment searched sea and sky for
the enemy; then smiled as if they had known all along that these muted bangs were some naval ritual of active service. Avellion did just as they, but with effort. Though his mind was calmly
convinced that there was no chance of war for at least another week, his nerves were uncontrollable. Thereafter he started at any sound at all.

A bugle summoned his mess to supper. He followed the notices which led him down, through hot and hotter boxes of steel, into the Marines’ flat. The ship’s company seemed little
affected by August in the Mediterranean. The soldiers blenched as they insinuated themselves between the steel walls, and the sweat leapt to their skins. Avellion felt faint. He slid onto one of
the long wooden benches and smiled dimly at his neighbors across the table until he recovered. The meal was simple; there were tinned stew, tinned and now liquid butter, and marmalade. He pecked at
them. There was warm water to drink.

The man who sat opposite him, sunburned as an Egyptian, said, as if apologizing for the shortcomings of the senior service:

“Not much in the way of grub, I’m afraid. They were given no warning that they had to pick us up, and it’s a marvel how they manage to feed us at all.”

The speaker’s silk shirt was open to the waist, and beads of perspiration trickled between the iron-gray hairs of his chest. Avellion knew the type. The man would turn out to be a colonel
at least, when he changed into uniform in Cairo.

“Jolly good show, I call it!” said Avellion stoutly.

The military eye rested on him pityingly and approvingly.

“They shouldn’t have sent civilians out this way.”

“It was the fastest,” Avellion replied. “We have to be there before the balloon goes up.”

A good phrase that. He had learned a number of them in the train: to say “browned off” for “fed up,” to speak of “armor” instead of “tanks.”
Thirty-six hours in the train. In his compartment one other businessman and four young chaps on their way to rejoin their units. All the whisky gone as well as some bottles of red wine they bought
at a station. Whisky. It was hard to eat a meal without it.

The senior officer left. Avellion asked who he was, and immediately aroused enthusiasm. Yes, he was a colonel and certain to be commanding a division in a year, and had all sorts of new theories
about armor. He had been invited to mess with the captain of the cruiser, but as soon as he saw how bloody uncomfortable everyone else was going to be, he insisted on coming along to share. Just
like him! Grand fellow!

With this shot of romanticism in his water, Avellion managed to drink two glasses of it. The liquid poured through his skin, leaving no satisfying body behind.

He staggered up on deck and retired to the space of forty square feet, between some ventilators and a pompom, where the civilians had drawn apart and spread out their bedding – two
blankets per man issued by the ship, and whatever they could find in their baggage to mitigate the hardness of the deck. Once by themselves, the businessmen were outspoken in their condemnation of
the cruiser, the discomfort, and the various government departments that had facilitated or demanded their voyage.

The ship raced southwards at thirty knots, and for a little while the contrast between the cool wind of her passage and the sweltering heat below decks was calming as whisky to Avellion. He took
no part in the general conversation. His inflated imperial mood had vanished, but nevertheless he was disgusted with his fellow civilians. They were wrong, and he was weary, and the world was very
wrong. If only he could sleep!

The night passed. It seemed an interminable twisting from one hip to the other; yet at times there was a glassy unconsciousness and at times a wild succession of half-wakeful thoughts, so mad
that they could only be explained as dreams.

At dawn he watched his companions crawl from their blankets, ridiculous in untidy scraps of clothing or wormlike in nakedness. He stayed still. The dreams bothered him. There was no way of
waking up from them; yet he was, he knew, awake. It was familiar enough, that feeling, but shadowed by the apprehension of some horror still unrealized.

The horror rose to the surface. There was to be no whisky that day and nearly all the next day. No whisky till Malta, thirty hours away, and no guarantee that one could land at Malta. But of
course they would be allowed to land. He clung to that. Only thirty hours away. And of course they would be allowed to land.

“Good morning to you.”

It was the cable manager. He had washed and shaved and extracted enough from a well-packed suitcase to give himself the dapper niceness of a holiday-maker.

“Got a touch of fever?”

Avellion tried to concentrate his thoughts.

“Fever? Fever?”

“You’re shaking all over.”

Avellion held out his hand and looked at it stupidly. It did not seem to belong to him. It was dancing. He put the tips of his index and third finger on his knee and let them gambol like the
legs of a ballerina. That was an old trick of his at parties – to wrap a handkerchief round his wrist to form the skirt and let his fingers dance. They danced now. His whole hand danced
furiously, and there was nothing at all he could do to stop it. He felt a rush of anger at the man who stared.

“Nonsense! Nonsense!” he said. “Always like this in the morning. Everybody is. Where the devil do I get a wash?”

He could not shave, but the cool water in which he dipped his face and wrists revived him. He dressed, and strolled round the deck, stepping with care over the prostrate bodies of the army. With
many he exchanged smiles. They felt, obviously, that their discomfort was comic, that nothing whatever could be done about the inefficiencies of the War Office as a travel agency, and that one
might as well enjoy the enforced idleness. For Avellion there was comfort in the prevailing bonhomie, and again a measure of calm in the exhilarating rush of the ship across a perfectly flat
Mediterranean. He could not face breakfast or lunch, but it was not so bad. Not so bad. And he was four and a half hours nearer Malta.

In the afternoon he had trouble with a very primitive Avellion who wanted to scream. He kept him in order, but was driven to cadge – very decently – for drinks. Drink was the subject
of his conversation with all casual acquaintances. But the passengers’ baggage was bone dry. Everyone to whom he spoke was also hoping to God that Mr. Avellion – his nose looked so
promising – would produce a bottle and himself offer treat. A naval officer murmured uncomfortably that the wardroom too was dry; they couldn’t, he said, very well open the bar for
themselves alone when the ship was full of devastatingly thirsty soldiers. He moved uneasily away.

Avellion clung for support to that
invaluable local knowledge.
He had it all right. His line had always been the native trade, and he knew the dhow skippers from Oman to Suez, their
ships, their reputations, and their rackets; little cargo could run the blockade to Abyssinia and no gossip of it be repeated in his office. He looked forward to new, stern friendships, more
dutiful than his innumerable bar acquaintanceships, more familiar than the strange attachments occasionally and passionately formed by Arabs for those they could not understand.

No more of just making and losing money. At last, he told himself, he had something to serve, and in good company like that colonel’s. For an important man, an important man in good and
gallant company, not to be able to stand two days without a drink was absurd. Self-control! Mustn’t make a fuss.

Two more hours passed, long as the whole voyage. The bugle summoned him to eat, but he could not face the mess flat and the sweating alleyways. The open deck was fresh and cool as sanity.

The cable manager had pity on him and, suspecting that the oily smell below had upset Mr. Avellion, brought him a sandwich. Avellion ate it and swallowed water. Nothing had taste or even
feeling.

“Bothered by the sea, old chap?”

Avellion shook his head. The confession broke from him.

“I’ve got to have a drink,” he cried harshly. “You don’t understand. I’ve shifted a lot in the last twenty years. Not real heavy drinking. Only just what one
needs in the tropics. It doesn’t do me any harm, but being cut off like this—”

His hand danced in the air describing a vague figure eight, a complicated gesture of emptiness.

“Ask the doctor for some,” suggested the cable manager. “You ought to taper off gently. He’ll know that.”

“Yes. Yes, I will. Of course.”

Avellion got up from his two blankets spread on the deck. He did not look back at them. There had been a queer shadow close to his ear, at the limit of vision. He scuttled off towards the sick
bay, and then could not remember why he wanted to go there. He sat down heavily on a stanchion. To go to the doctor – of course that was it: to ask the doctor for a drink.

The cruiser hurled herself through the water, white ensign at the stern stiff with the wind of passage as the tin flag on a toy ship. The mercenaries of the Middle East strolled leisurely past
Avellion; they could, he gathered, endure the steady diet of stew and marmalade; they could sleep well enough on blankets and the deck; they were ribald at the overcrowding, so close that one
man’s head was between the feet of another; but they still cursed bitterly at the lack of any alcohol to beguile the tedium of the voyage.

It seemed to Avellion that he was not alone in his torment. He was again ashamed. He too was a servant of the state, and invaluable. If they could endure privation, he could. Good God, he had
recaptured his youth during those long hours in the train!

The doctor? It might be less than twenty hours to Malta at this speed. Then he could soak in it, and afterwards taper off gradually. That colonel, the one who sat and sweated into his marmalade,
wasn’t asking for special privileges. What? Go squealing to the doctor with all his comrades as thirsty as he? Comrades – comrades – he kept rolling the young word through his
mind as he walked back to his blankets.

The night was peopled with strange images. It seemed busier and less long than the last. Once he screamed.

“Sorry, chaps. Must have had a nightmare.”

It cost him a physical effort to say so. He wanted to go on screaming and tell them why. He screamed twice more – simply couldn’t help it – but managed to make them sound like
violent coughs.

In the morning he felt better. The shadow in the corner of his eyes had gone. He decided that he hadn’t felt so well for a long time. That was what came from self-control, from really
knocking off the drink. He had a pet, too. As soon as the others had gone to breakfast he played with it. It seemed quite tame, but stayed always out of reach of his hand.

When the cable manager came back, Avellion showed it to him.

“Look at him!” he said. “Animals know whom to trust.”

“Look at what?”

“Here, man, here! See him?”

“See what?”

“Little black rat. His Majesty’s rat! Look at him.”

The cable manager did not always appreciate jokes. He was therefore unduly willing to accept them when they were not there.

“Very good! Very good!” he said with an embarrassed laugh, and trotted away to take his exercise.

Several people watched, disturbed, the flitting of Mr. Avellion’s hands and listened to the endearing terms in which he spoke to the invisible; but he looked sane, though unshaven, and
they gave him the benefit of the doubt – an eccentric passing the hours of idleness in his own way, with, undoubtedly, the help of a secret bottle.

In a dream Avellion waited for Malta. There was nothing clear in his brain out a longing and a prohibition. “It will be all right when you get to Malta,” he said to himself.
“Do nothing till you get to Malta.” Desire was no longer so simple that it could be defined as wanting a drink. At Malta there would be an end to unknown agony.

The colonel sat down by Mr. Avellion. He did not know what was wrong, or indeed if there was anything seriously wrong at all. He talked very casually with the eccentric businessman, and at last,
as a good regimental officer, he understood and he admired the rat. He also said that Malta was in sight. Mr. Avellion began to weep. He then screamed luxuriously, and kept on screaming while the
colonel led him to the sick bay.

Mr. Avellion got his whisky, but it was of little interest to him. He even reached Malta, or at least the launch which came out to carry him to the hospital. The ship reported him as a case of
delirium tremens caused by a habitual drinker’s sudden want of alcohol. There were plenty of such cases in the books, due to poverty or isolation in desert or at sea. The ship was doubtful
whether d.t. could be caused by sheer courage, but could give no other explanation of Mr. Avellion’s abstinence and death.

P
RIVATE KIRIAKOS VACLIS
was in his middle thirties, and not so handy an infantryman as he had been when he completed long
ago his military training. His heart and mustache were exceedingly fierce, but his belly was still round – though conforming, after a month of Greek rations and mountain warfare, more nearly
to the platoon average. He was in civil life headwaiter in an Athens café. When the military smiled at this former profession, he explained to them, with passionate eloquence, that the
culmination of the soldier’s art was nothing but great efficiency at great speed – and who should know more of that than he?