Tales of Adventurers (18 page)

They were as charming as could be, and wanted to know if there was anything they could do for us. Tony kept them amused with stories of the Navy in Valparaiso (which he must have heard in the
Port Control mess) and Petronilla had the effrontery to ask for a bath. She went off down the hill with the Rector and his wife, and, the last I heard of her, she was promising to lecture to the
Women’s Institute on the objects of the expedition.

She came back in the dark, full of tea, with the salt washed out of her hair. The camp equipment was sketchy (for it had to be kept light), but when we had crawled into the second tent we found
our night’s rest luxurious. Our sleeping bag was cozy; the ground was dry and stayed parallel to the horizon; and we didn’t have to turn out every four hours to relieve the wheel. Tony
complained that the cold at the top of the Andes couldn’t possibly be worse than that of an English spring; but even he got a kick out of the open-air life. Of course he was carrying on both
hips enough gin and angostura to make him feel a hero at the end of the day’s march.

It was a convincing expedition when we had loaded up the ponies in the morning. Ground sheets, blankets and tents were neatly folded, and hanging down on each side of the ponies to hide the
barrels. Here and there Henry slung some odd frying pans and junk, in order that the packs should not look too tidy. He and Tony seemed to have no difficulty in walking twenty-five miles a day.
Petronilla and I, who prefer anything but our feet to move us, marched along with them till eleven. That became the routine. We walked just as long as we enjoyed it, and then took a train or bus to
some point within easy reach of their next stop.

All went smoothly till we were tramping over the bare downs between Blandford and Salisbury. It was a morning when the wind and rain swept across the grass, and the air was dull gray like an
elephant’s back. You could see that the farmers in those parts preferred plenty of rich space. They had it. Give me trees and hedges and little sheltered fields – uneconomic, perhaps,
but more comfortable for man and beast.

A chap came bowling out of the low clouds, driving a tractor as if it were his personal tank, and drew up alongside us while we plodded through the driving damp. He was all muffled up in
leather, wool and mackintoshes, and showed nothing but a lock of lank, dark hair flopping over one amused dark eye.

“Dirty weather,” he said, clearing a space in his wrappings to talk through. “Are you going far?”

“Camping under Clearbury Ring,” Tony answered.

“The glass is still falling. And, if you like,” he offered, “I’ve plenty of room for you and the ponies.”

We didn’t much care for close inspection, but it was hard to refuse; and, with the weather as it was, we didn’t want to refuse.

“Are you doing this for pleasure?” he asked. “Pilgrimage to Walsingham or something?”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” I replied, “as a matter of fact, we are just hardening the ponies of the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society.”

Tony congratulated me afterwards. He said I had the proper apologetic tone of an Englishman who is caught doing something out of the ordinary.

“This will harden ’em all right,” the man agreed. “Well, come along, and get dry. My name is Redworth and my farm is down in the dip there.”

And he charged off in his tractor as if he had just got the order to get into position hull down on the ridge.

We struck across a long slope of ploughland, and turned into the yard of an old, gray stone manor. Redworth showed us a fine barn, and told us to do what we liked with it. The barn might have
been made for us; there was plenty of light, but when the high doors were shut, farm hands couldn’t see inside. Bales of hay were provided for the ponies, and glad we were to have them.
Forage had been the chief difficulty all along. We couldn’t carry much extra weight, so we had to stop and buy. This usually meant that the farmer offered us stabling. Then we had to refuse
it, on the weak excuse of hardening the ponies.

Henry stayed on guard over the barrels – and again our excuse that he would not be separated from his animals sounded pretty feeble, though it happened to be true. The rest of us trooped
into the farmhouse for lunch. Redworth did us well, with a pre-war hospitality. When the port had circulated, he remarked:

“I was born in La Paz.”

“How romantic!” said Petronilla, who had been cooing at him for some time. “Where is it?”

“In Bolivia. On top of the Andes.”

“Our experience,” I said quickly, “Petronilla’s and mine, I mean, has been wholly in Central Asia.”

“But your Exploration Society?” he asked. “I suppose it’s all planned by experts on the Andes?”

Tony immediately began to throw around the names of patrons and financiers, keeping carefully off geography. The trouble was that we had thought of everything except looking up some patter on
the Andes.

“You’re going to the Montaña, of course?” Redworth insisted.

He said it as if there were no other possible territory for exploration, so we agreed.

“With those ponies?”

“They have been specially selected by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons for high-altitude work,” said Tony impressively.

“Then they certainly won’t live long in the Montaña. And why do your people go to the expense of shipping ponies, when you could get mules on the spot? Don’t think me
rude,” he added, “but I know the country.”

I won’t spin out the agony. Even when Petronilla pretended her garter had broken, she couldn’t head him off. Redworth found out just how much we knew about the Andes, and kept
circulating bottles.

“Now, look here, boys and girls,” he said at last, “I’m only a farmer, but I’ve knocked around the world a bit. What’s the racket? And let me say that
whatever it is I think you’re sports.”

Petronilla is a clever girl. She stopped Tony just as he had started on a marvelous story about selling pack ponies for mountain guns in Palestine.

“Tell him the truth,” she said. “He’s going to laugh.”

Tony and I looked fools, so she didn’t wait. She told him the whole venture right from the beginning, and it didn’t lose in the telling. When she dealt with our March voyages to and
from the Loire, I felt like Sir Francis Drake.

“And you’re going to give this stuff to some black marketeer at three quid a liter, when he’ll sell it at seven?” he asked. “What you poor fish need is a marketing
board. Now, Rancy, is this stuff drinkable?”

“If it’s the same as we tasted in the shipper’s office,” I said, “it’s good, and we’ll get four pounds easy.”

“If it’s the same as you tasted!” Redworth exclaimed. “Do you chaps trust the first fellow who comes along?”

“Any complaints?” Petronilla asked.

Well, that made him chuckle. Then we went out and prized Henry off the barrels, where he was sitting as obstinately as a broody hen, and tapped one.

“I imagine,” said Redworth, running the brandy over his palate, “that this
is
what you tasted.”

He drew himself another, and lectured us on the decay of country life. You were not allowed petrol, he said, to visit your neighbors; and, when you broke the law and did visit them, there was
little or nothing to drink. We revived, he told us eloquently, the glories of the past when every country gentleman defied the government, and filled his cellars and dressed his wife off the backs
of the pack horses.

We had another all round, and he began to declaim Kipling in a voice that was far too loud even for the heavy barn doors which contained us:

“Can I have the rest of that puncheon at five pounds a liter?”

“Six,” said Tony.

“I’ll make it five ten,” he offered, “and we’ll talk business for future shipments. Why the hell should those spivs in London have all the good stuff while we have
to put up with government port in the country? I’m going to form a syndicate. There’s a lot of money in this district since we found out how to keep dairy cattle on the open downs all
the year round.”

Redworth thought that his local market could consume the product of two more trips – and two more were certainly all we dared undertake. People would begin to wonder why the
Society’s ponies needed so much practice.

As for our march to the London suburb, he suggested that we should call it off then and there.

“Send your tubs up by rail,” he proposed, “two by two from different stations. Stencil your preposterous Society’s name all over them, and mark them
Spoiled Stores
for Analysis!
The only risk is that one of them might be holed, and that’s very unlikely if you put them on a passenger train yourselves.”

We took his advice, and sent the nine remaining tubs by four different routes. Tony’s firm of importers disliked sending their plain van all round London to pick up the cargo, and I gather
they approached the barrels pretty cautiously; but they collected them, and they paid out at three ten.

The next trip was uneventful. No story in it at all.
Antigua
had a fine run out, with a change of wind just when we wanted it, and there was calm all over the western Atlantic on the
way back. That came a bit heavy on the Diesel fuel, but we didn’t worry. We had earned, so Petronilla said, twelve hundred pounds clear profit on the first trip, and – with a guaranteed
market at five pounds the liter – we stood to make two thousand on this. The cross-country march was a picnic. We kept clear of Redworth’s farm, to avoid any connection between him and
us, and unloaded in a remote barn belonging to one of the syndicate, where we rebuilt a potato clamp over the top of the barrels. They were ten-liter puncheons this time, to make distribution
easier.

Redworth met us at the barn, and paid in pound notes on the spot. He said that half a dozen country houses were taking the stuff, and that two tubs – just to keep up the tradition –
were going to the cathedral close in Salisbury. The next cargo, he told us, had been largely ordered by the lawyers and land agents, and he had a request for a small lot of the finest armagnac
obtainable at almost any price we liked to ask.

He was a queer fellow, Redworth. Tony says I am wrong, but I swear he never took a penny profit – and Petronilla agrees with me. He was a passionate country lover, and he was determined to
take some of the melancholy out of country life. And then, of course, if you have been born in a Latin civilization, you have no patience with governments which put punitive taxes on the juice of
the grape. He didn’t object to paying for what he wanted; he just resented the utter incompetence of government buyers. In questions of drink he was a pure idealist.

Tony was all against running a third cargo into the Coombe River. Petronilla and I, who had less respect for the Customs, disagreed. We insisted that the first trip did not count, for the
ponies, owing to the luck of our quick passage and Henry’s eye for weather, had come and gone in the dark, and had never been seen near the coast at all.
Antigua
was not suspected.
The yacht club had even invited us to serve on the regatta committee.

Down in the Loire we had no trouble, and loaded up some first-class expensive wallop for those lawyers and land agents. We lost the jib and, very nearly, me off the Lizard, but George fished me
out as I came roaring along the lee quarter on top of a sea. Meanwhile Tony was having one scare after another.

On the second trip he had, of course, called on the local landowner, and obtained his permission to exercise the Society’s ponies on his hillsides. The steep wooded slopes, he said, were
just the practice ground we needed to test the ponies for the Montaña. We knew all about the Montaña now from Redworth.

That second cargo had been landed in heavy rain, and the path through the woods, which at first had been hard, was thoroughly churned up. Tony thought it wise to find out how much the owner had
noticed before he committed himself to those woods for a third time.

He left Henry and the ponies a day’s march away, and went to pay a call at the big house in the most correct naval manner. The landowner was cordial as could be, but much too curious; he
was puzzled by the hoof-marks.

“I see you give your ponies more weight coming uphill,” he said. “What do you load them with?”

“Water,” Tony replied.

He says that he fired the answer straight back, but I’ll bet there was a good deal of humming and hawing and hesitation.

“We pack it in skins,” Tony explained, “to find out what weight they can carry on any angle of slope. Every detail is scientifically checked.”

The man was not in the least suspicious, but it was certain that the whole district would know that the Society had taken its pack ponies down to the water, and certain that the Customs would
wonder why. In the country an exciting visitor such as the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society is a heaven-sent topic for conversation.

When the local sergeant of police deliberately came up to the camp for a longish chat, Tony told him plenty about weights and angles, and added that this was the last journey before the
expedition embarked for South America and that the ponies were moving back towards London the next day. The sergeant went away happy, but the game was up.

Tony had to work fast, for we were due in a couple of days. The first, immediate essential was to send Henry and the ponies twenty more miles to the east; and that he did. He said good-bye to
the landowner and other casual friends around the Coombe River, and thanked them for their help and courtesy. In our experience there’s no man or woman in England – especially if not
asked for a subscription – who isn’t thrilled to help explorers.

For us in
Antigua
it was always nervous work creeping upriver in the dark, for we couldn’t tell what might have happened while we were away. We were ready for any disaster; so it
was not altogether a surprise when we nearly ran down Tony in a hired dinghy as we were about to change course into the creek. He had been out there for two nights pretending to fish. I told you
that ours was not an easy way to earn a living.