Tales of Adventurers (19 page)

We took him aboard, and he gave us the news. If the ponies again left tracks down to the shore, he explained, on the very night of
Antigua’s
arrival, someone was sure to notice
the coincidence, and the police would have every excuse to call at the camp and search the packs.

“It has cost us three hundred quid,” he said, “but I think we’ll get away with the cargo. Can you take
Antigua
alongside the road, Bill?”

“What the hell do you think she is?” I snapped. “A pontoon?”

Knowing Tony’s nautical proficiency as I did, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had proposed to tie up
Antigua
in a car park. I misjudged him. He had a really promising
plan. He explained with some warmth that at the entrance to the next blasted creek a bend in the road came down to within a hundred feet of my blasted high-water mark.

We dived into the saloon to look at the chart. There was a mile of mud between us and the road, and it was doubtful if there would be enough water for
Antigua
to get close inshore. The
tide was making, however, and would float us off again if we went aground. So the gamble was good.

“Run up as close as you can,” Tony said. “Then I’ll row ashore. I’ve a bicycle hidden under the hedge, and in about an hour I’ll bring the
transport.”

We waited long enough for him to be well on his way, and then began to close in to the shore on the top of the tide. There was little traffic on that road after midnight. We only saw the lights
of two cars and a motorcycle. All depended on silence and speed just as in old days, when we would unload anywhere, even at a wharf, so long as Tony was sure of ten undisturbed minutes.

George paddled ahead in the pram, taking soundings. Once across the mud, he found a steep-to beach of broken shale. I went ashore and looked at the afternoon’s high-tide mark. I reckoned
that I could risk shoving
Antigua’s
bow into the land foot by foot until she touched, especially if we piled all the cargo forward, ready to be lowered overboard.

We could hear Tony’s transport half a mile away. When it arrived – a great black bulk against the sky, looking unnecessarily large – I touched the beach. As soon as the barrels
were overboard, the bow rose clear, and Petronilla, who was standing by the engines, went astern and anchored.

Of all the things! That transport was an enormous caravan, marked M
AC
G
INNIS
’ M
AMMOTH
F
AIR
,
towed by a Diesel traction engine. The three of us and MacGinnis had the stuff inside, where the swing boats were carried, in under fifteen minutes. Tony told us where to find his camp, and they
rumbled off into the night.

We were all safe on our moorings in the morning, and the Customs turned us inside out. I don’t blame them. They had – thank the Lord! – no reason to connect us with the ponies,
but it was the third time that we had come into the river after dark. They searched even the fuel tanks and the mattresses, and when we complained of the damage they merely told us in a nasty way
that it would teach us to arrive during daylight.

They found nothing. There wasn’t even a smell except Petronilla’s perfume – bought in England of course. She broke a bottle accidentally in case the tubs of brandy had left a
faint memory behind them – and then painted herself up to look like a girl who had to have her own particular Fleurs de Castor Oil even on the High Seas.

We remained in
Antigua
for twenty-four hours, putting things to rights, and joined the Society’s camp. We found Tony asleep. He had had four nights without shutting an eye, and
only cat naps in the day. When he woke up, he filled in the gaps of his story that he hadn’t had time to tell.

After sending Henry and the ponies further back inland, he had a tough day in the local market town looking for transport. One truck driver, when asked if he would like to earn a hundred quid,
had simply walked off. Another, in charge of a furniture van, had said he wouldn’t risk any monkey business for less than five hundred. It was only when Tony was bicycling out of town,
convinced that we should have to throw the cargo overboard, that he had seen the three caravans of swings and Dodge’em Cars belonging to MacGinnis’ Mammoth Fair. It wasn’t very
mammoth, and he guessed that MacGinnis might be glad of some spare cash while wintering on the south coast. MacGinnis turned out to be a sport. Most show people are. He stood out for three hundred
quid when he heard what the job was, but he did it.

They drove inland with the cargo, and at first light had a desperate half hour, beating about for a place near the roadside where the load could be safely dumped. At last they turned up a gravel
drive which led to some important house and was bordered by a neglected shrubbery of laurels and rhododendrons. They shoved the tubs into the bushes, and prayed that the gardener wouldn’t
choose that day to start pruning or sweeping up the leaves. The next night Tony and Henry picked up the load with the ponies, and returned to camp.

For this last journey we chose a new route, well to the north of our usual track, through the deep lanes and meadows of the Somerset border. Some of our camps were not so lonely as we should
have liked; on the other hand, the curiosity we aroused was all fresh and innocent – until, that is, we fell in with the Press.

We never had any trouble with reporters – they don’t look for stories on top of the downs – but in the vale, passing close to one bustling little market town after another, we
were News. On the night before we reached the sheep and the short turf and safety, we had a call from an enterprising lad who worked for the local paper.

Tony filled him up with pink gin and Redworth’s yarns of the Andes. In three more days we intended to sell the ponies and disappear into the mass of respectable citizens, so it
didn’t much matter what he said about the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society. The only information Tony would not give him was the personnel of the expedition. He threw out broad
hints that the object of the Society was to look for a rare mineral in the Montaña, that we were prominent scientists and that on no account should our names be mentioned.

The reporter ate that up. He was enormously impressed by the trust we had placed in him. He asked if he might take a photograph of the string of ponies when we climbed up to the downs at dawn.
We said that we should be delighted, so long as he didn’t mind our hats being pulled well down over our faces.

He took his shots of us, and we went on our way, striking southeast along the edge of Salisbury Plain, then over Cranborne Chase and home like the swallows (who were just arriving) to that
lonely barn and the potato clamps. Tony remained on the spot to collect from Redworth, and Petronilla, Henry and I took the ponies down to Dorchester market. At our last camp we made a bonfire of
the packsaddles, and that, we thought, was the end of the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society.

Tony joined us in Dorchester with the cash. Our total profit for the three trips (after Petronilla had conscientiously deducted repairs to
Antigua
and yearly depreciation) was nearer
six thousand than five. The ponies were in fine condition; on them, too, we made a profit, and handed it over to Henry as a special bonus.

We were feeling on top of the world, and I telephoned Redworth that we would all like to go down to the farm and say good-bye. He was in a flap. What with Bolivian excitement and English
reticence, he was so obscure that I could get no sense out of him. At last he said
Haven’t you read
The Times? and hung up.

I hadn’t. I grabbed a copy off the table in the hotel lounge, and had a look. You know those gorgeous photographs on the back page of
The Times
. English countryside. Fields of
wild daffodils. Flights of geese on the marshes. Old cider presses under snow. And so on. This was one of the finest they ever printed. You looked up to the crest of the downs, and thorn and grass
were bending before the wind, and there on the skyline was the string of ponies, beautifully spaced, moving together, looking like a frieze modeled against the racing clouds. Underneath was the
caption:

We hired a car, and within twenty minutes we were out of that hotel and on our way down to the Coombe River. After that publicity, and a fake address for the Society, and no
answer to any of the letters addressed to it, the cops were sure to make some inquiries. So we all sailed over to Ireland, where our faces weren’t known. By the grace of God there was nothing
whatever to link
Antigua
with the Society and its ponies!

When we had settled down comfortably in a sheltered little anchorage on the Galway Coast, I sent Redworth an unsigned picture postcard with our address. In a few weeks he wrote us a most
discreet letter, just giving the local news as if it had nothing at all to do with us.

He said that he and a dozen other farmers had been bothered by the police about a certain British Imperial Andean Exploration Society, and that none of them knew why. The Society had seemed to
them quite genuine.

“I have been making a few inquiries on my own,” he went on, “and it seems that our poor old country is being shot at again. I cannot imagine what on earth induced this Society
to call itself Imperial. I hear that there have been strong protests from every single South American republic that owns a slice of Andes, and that when the Foreign Office swears there isn’t
and never was such a Society, it’s accused of covering up some imperial bit of monkey business. The liberals are going to make matters worse by asking a question in the House, and
there’s not a thing that anybody can do about it.”

But that is where he was wrong. I could write this story, and I have.

W
E, THE FRENCH
– said Maître Braillard, stretching his feet under the table and swallowing a draught of the
acid white wine which was all the café had in 1946 to offer – are ever ready to accept tradition. I speak to you as a lawyer and perhaps I exaggerate. But in my opinion the worst that
the occupation did to us was to destroy our sense of continuity with the past.

This wine is revolting, but will do while we wait for better. And I assure you that within two years the tradition of the Gallic palate will have triumphed.

It is customary – he went on – to prophesy that the revolution we are undoubtedly about to suffer will be more drastic than our revolution one hundred and fifty years ago. I do not
believe it. We wish to order our lives by the law. We accept immediately the law. It is only when we know not what the law is that we become a little difficult.

I will tell you a story. It has a slight piggery, but we are after dinner – if indeed we may dignify by the name the small portions of antique horse and salad that we have just
consumed.

Do you know the municipality of Saint-Valery-sur-Marne? No? I am not surprised. Saint-Valery is ten kilometers from the fortifications and remarkable only for its ugliness and its extensive
railroad yard. If you travel round Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Quai d’Orsay, your train will inevitably pass through Saint-Valery. But why should you be in it? You will of course spend
some hours in Paris, and will pick up your train again at the Quai d’Orsay.

Saint-Valery has a black canal, and some small industries without any permanence, built of cement and corrugated iron. There is no architecture. There are only hoardings, and houses of a
startling melancholy. It is quite evident that one is compelled to inhabit Saint-Valery; one does not choose it.

In the middle of this tasteless wilderness are the railroad tracks, and in the middle of the tracks is a little tower of dirty brick. The tower is old. I do not know how old, nor what it was
for; it might have been the base of a round dovecot. But now the interior has been rearranged – you understand – as a convenience for railway men.

It stood, this tower, upon a triangle of blackened gravel between the canal sidings and the main loop line round Paris. In spite of this little-promising situation, the brickwork was covered by
a resplendent vine. There was no other green thing within three hundred meters; not even a dandelion could live in such a waste of steel and cinders. But the vine was older than the railroad, and
its roots were far down in good French soil. It was well nourished by the iron that filtered in solution through the gravel and had, no doubt, some other excellent sources of fertility.

In August of 1945 the vine was superb. It rejoiced in its liberation. The walls and parapet of the tower were jeweled with bunches as long as my forearm. The grapes were of that indescribable
tint which is purple, yet not quite purple. All the station staff of Saint-Valery were agreed that it needed but twenty-four more August hours for fifty bunches to be at their perfection.

Mme. Delage, who was the wife of the stationmaster and impatient for good morsels as befitted an admirable housekeeper who was tormented by the impossibility of a decent table, was the first to
lose her self-restraint. One had not yet decided upon the ultimate destiny of the grapes; one had perhaps deliberately avoided so delicate a subject. Mme. Delage, however, had set her heart upon a
bunch, already and indubitably ripe, which hung on the south wall immediately above the window of the tower.

I knew her well. She had a black mustache, and her rotundities, though massive, were more square than round. She had no reason to hope for those attentions which traditionally await the wives of
stationmasters. She wore high-heeled shoes, as was proper for the consort of an important functionary, but they did not become her ankles. She resembled, I thought, a hippopotamus on skates.
Nevertheless M. Delage was a model husband. She had fine brown eyes, one must admit, and then he was very afraid of her.