The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife (37 page)

The dinner with the Marstons, lunch with McNab, lunch with Pellow, a farewell supper with the Stedmans and another with the Cribbs, turned Mr. Darby's week into a whirl of sociability. As he sat opposite Sarah in the London train (for Sarah was accompanying him south to see him off) it seemed to him that only a few hours had passed since he had sat in the train coming north.

•    •    •    •    •    •    •    •

When they reached Bedford Square they found Punnett already arrived. He was standing, tall and melancholy, in the entrance-hall when Princep opened the front door to them.

‘Ah, good evening, Punnett. You've not forgotten your camera, I hope?' said Mr. Darby as soon as he caught sight of him.

‘No, sir. The camera's upstairs.' He bowed to Sarah and wished her good evening.

‘We shall have a busy morning to-morrow, packing, Punnett,' said Mr. Darby over his shoulder, as he sailed down the corridor. Then he paused. ‘Princep!'

‘Sir?'

‘Has a telescope arrived? A large … ah … package from Negretti & Zambra?'

‘Yes, sir. I took it up to your dressing-room.'

‘Good! And the pictures have been called for, I presume?'

‘Yes, sir; they went away on Thursday.'

So the gallery would be empty, the walls stark. Mr. Darby glanced at the doors at the end of the corridor. The title
The Picture Gallery
was still over the door, an ironical epitaph on his noble ambitions. He turned away and entered the smoking-room. He would not visit the gallery again: it would be too painful.

•    •    •    •    •    •    •    •

Next morning, the morning which Mr. Darby had told Punnett would be a busy one, was not, as it turned out, a
very busy one for him, for Sarah took the matter out of his hands.

‘You'd much better go out, Jim,' she said, ‘and leave the packing to me and Punnett. You never were much of a packer, you know.'

‘Go out? Where to?' asked Mr. Darby.

‘Well, surely you have one or two little things to do before you leave London? ‘Sarah replied.

‘Ah … well … ah … yes!' said Mr. Darby. ‘In point of … ah … fact, I fancy I have, Sarah.'

Sarah nodded. ‘What did I tell you? ‘she said. ‘So you'd better go and get them done and leave me and Punnett to get on with the work.'

A few minutes later Mr. Darby left the house on foot with every suggestion, in his gait and mien, of important business.

Meanwhile Sarah and Punnett repaired to Mr. Darby's dressing-room where a large new cabin-trunk stood open on the floor.

‘I'm glad to have a chance of talking to you alone, Punnett,' said Sarah, as soon as Punnett had closed the door, ‘because I want to give you a few hints about Mr. Darby. You'll find he requires a great deal of looking after; a regular handful, I assure you.'

Punnett smiled apologetically. ‘Quite so, madam. I had already gathered that, if you'll excuse my saying so. My late master was the same; a mere child in all practical matters. You may rely on me, madam.'

‘I do, Punnett. Now, in the first place, he'll never change his underwear unless you put them out for him: and as for thick things and thin things, there's not the least use asking
him
; just use your own judgment. If the weather's hot, take away his thick things and put out the thin, and vice versa. You'll find him pretty healthy, but now and then he gets pains in the stomach. It's generally the result of a chill. I find the best thing to do is to wrap him round the middle in three or four thicknesses of flannel, put him to bed with a hot water bottle, and give him a couple of Aspirins. I've got four large bottles of Aspirins for him, and I've brought a roll of
flannel too. We'll pack them under his shirts where you'll find them easily. Another thing, but this you may not be able to manage. Never, if you can stop him, let him drink whisky after he's had wine. It always upsets him. If you were to tell him that the best people never do it, ten to one that would make him remember.'

‘I'll do so, madam,' said Punnett with perfect seriousness.

‘Of course,' Sarah went on, ‘I know nothing of this jungle place he's determined to visit. I understand you've been there. Is it very unhealthy?'

‘No, madam; it might well be worse. But a little quinine is useful at times.'

‘Quinine? Then will you be sure to get him some?'

‘I will, madam. I always take it to such places myself, so I shall not forget.'

So did Sarah and Punnett, under the eye of a watchful Providence, arrange the affairs of the absent Mr. Darby; so did the long arm of Number Seven Moseley Terrace, Savershill, prepare to extend itself to the remote and fabulous Mandratia.

A quarter of an hour before lunch-time the packing was finished and as Sarah reached the bottom of the stairs the front-door opened and Mr. Darby came in.

‘Well! Had a busy morning?' asked Sarah.

‘Ah … yes!' said Mr. Darby, his words accompanied by an agreeable aroma of sherry; ‘Yes, I've been pretty well on what I should call the
go
, all morning.'

•    •    •    •    •    •    •    •

Mr. Darby and Sarah found themselves deprived of their usual heartiness at lunch. The boat train for Tilbury left St. Pancras at three-thirty, and now that all was ready and there remained nothing to do but wait, the full reality of the coming separation confronted each of them for the first time. Mr. Darby now looked forward to his approaching plunge—no mere spritely dive from end to end of England this time, but a cold, formidable, deep-sea plunge to the other side of the world—without the faintest flicker of enthusiasm. To be
flat, he wished he wasn't going; and yet, if it had been possible for him now, without loss of dignity, to abolish his expedition, he would not have done so. For somewhere out of sight, in the hidden centre of his being, the new Darby grasped the lever with a remorseless hand. Tight-lipped and fierce-spectacled he was holding the poor quavering old Darby to the execution of his long-cherished ambitions. But the dismal afternoon before him, the long-postponed goodbye as he and Sarah journeyed sadly down to Tilbury, the final farewell and the waving to the solitary figure left behind,—these surely the inexorable New Darby might, without detriment to discipline, spare them. Yes, the New Darby consented to excuse them that; and Mr. Darby, as he neatly jointed the wing of a chicken, noiselessly framed a selection of phrases in which he might suggest to Sarah that they should say goodbye here in Bedford Square. But not a sentence could he find which avoided the risk of the misapprehension that her company to Tilbury would be unwelcome. No, he thought, as he sat there silently chewing and looking at his plate, no, it couldn't be done, it was too risky. It would be terrible to hurt her feelings at the last moment.

Meanwhile Sarah was similarly occupied. The idea of the parting was so painful to her that she longed to be done with it at once. If she had known that he was feeling the same she would have agreed at once that they should part here, in the house. As it was, she told herself that she must see it through. After all, she would feel happier in the end if she had seen him on to the liner, tucked him safely into it, as it were, and viewed with her own eyes the boat that was to be his home for the next six weeks. She would be able, then, to picture him there day by day. Besides Jim would expect her to see him off at the docks. He was such a one for occasions.

And so the two, each afraid of failing the other, held themselves to their slow torture.

•    •    •    •    •    •    •    •

At ten minutes past three precisely Mr. Darby's great journey began. We may word it, as Mr. Darby himself did some days later before falling asleep in his comfortable cabin on the
Utopia
, in the language of the tablet which will some day be placed upon the house in Bedford Square: ‘From this house, at 3.10 p.m. on September 7th, 1925, Sir William James Darby, Bart., the famous explorer, set out on his adventurous voyage to the Mandratic Peninsula.'

For Mr. Darby, as for every born traveller, the very fact of being on the move was exhilarating, and as he and Sarah steamed out of St. Pancras in the first-class smoker which he had reserved for them, he was able to converse with some, at least, of his customary eloquence. But as the brief journey neared its end, a dejection, aggravated by the dreary district through which they were passing, settled upon him, and they approached Tilbury in a melancholy silence. A sudden startlingly close glimpse of huge funnels and vast, fungus-like ventilators sent a thrill of fear through both of them, and next minute, as the train began to slow down, Punnett entered the carriage and collected Mr. Darby's hand-luggage. Soon they were all three on the platform and drifting with the human stream that flowed slowly out of the station. As they emerged into the open, again and more terribly close those enormous funnels and ventilators towered above them. There were three liners anchored there. The closest and most formidable rose above the edge of the Quay in a vast wall. It had the monstrous inhumanity, with its tiers of small sinister portholes, of the wall of a prison, and yet the slow animal curve of it suggested some vast living creature. High above the great wall, gallery above gallery, rose the white decks and the bridge, and, raked back as if to breast portentous storms, the two scarlet funnels, incredibly huge, barred the smoky sky. From the lip of one of them a small plume of steam curled like an ostrich feather.

Sarah and Mr. Darby gazed up at the enormous structure in awe. They had not known that ships could be so huge. Each felt a sinking at the heart. For Sarah the great ship had something of the threatening grimness of death. Once that
tremendous, inhuman mechanism had swallowed Jim, she would never, she felt, see him again. The procession of which they formed a part, the procession of human mites that was winding itself slowly into the great thing's bowels, seemed to her foreboding heart a funeral procession.

To Mr. Darby too the
Utopia
seemed a thing of menace. Its colossal size, those two immense funnels, instead of reassuring him, disturbed him to the depths of his soul. Its size only portended the size of the storms with which it was designed to wrestle. Though he had no wish to die, yet it seemed to him that to go to the bottom in a small boat would be at least a gallant human adventure: one would go down as a man who had fought the elements and been beaten. But the sinking of a monster like this would be merely appalling, a horror of lurching corridors, of walls become floors, floors heeled up vertically into walls, a stark, inhuman tragedy in which men would die like a swarm of rats, their heroisms of no account, their very identity taken from them. As he climbed the gangway, stepped on board and felt the deck solid under his feet, what he realized was not his security but the terrific power of seas that could swing such decks to the steepness of a high-pitched roof.

But when the great ship had, as it were, digested them and they stood in Mr. Darby's large, comfortable, rose-coloured cabin, they were suddenly reassured and fascinated. ‘Why, he'll be perfectly all right, after all,' thought Sarah, and Mr. Darby felt that even when it did swing about a little, one could never be very ill at ease in such a charming, luxurious and obviously permanent bedroom.

Finding themselves alone, they took the opportunity of a farewell embrace.

‘It's only for a few weeks, Sarah,' said Mr. Darby, feeling at that moment that he could not bear a longer separation. ‘I shall be back, no doubt, a few weeks after Christmas.'

‘You will, Jim? ‘Sarah replied, smiling at the unexpected reassurance.

‘Oh indubiously, my dear,' he said. ‘Six weeks there, six weeks back, three weeks perhaps in Australia and
then just a look-in on the … ah … Peninsula on the way home.'

Suddenly a tremendous, deep buzzing startled them, a buzzing that made the cabin shudder, grew, expanded, flowered into a raucous golden hum, and roofed the whole of Tilbury with a burning cupola of sound, a hum like the very call of Doom. It was as if all the metal in the great ship, the plates of her vast shell, the girders and stanchions, the great unseen engines, the funnels, the ventilators, every rail and bar and handle, had suddenly become alive and vocal. The siren was warning relations and friends to leave the ship. Humble and afraid before that tyrannous voice, Sarah and Mr. Darby hurried along the corridor and up the companion-way, following the others who made for the gangway. In the little crowd that slowly filtered away down the gangway they waited speechless for Sarah's turn. When it came, she snatched blindly with her left hand at her husband's and, without looking at him, stepped on to the gangway.

Mr. Darby moved to a place apart from the crowd and stood, with his hands on the broad wooden rail, anxiously watching her, ready to wave if she should turn. And when she reached the Quay she did turn, paused and turned and looked up for a moment at the high deck, her eyes vague, bewildered, searching the faces that looked down. He waved but she did not see him and suddenly she turned away, hurried towards the station-entrance and vanished into it. Mr. Darby, immovable, watched the entrance in case she should reappear, but the minutes passed and suddenly again the huge shuddering hum of the
Utopia's
siren burst out and possessed river and earth and sky, and Mr. Darby felt the deck begin to pulse under the heavy ominous throb of the ship's engines. That solemn waking of the ship sent through him a thrill of fearful joy. Men on the Quay were hauling at a huge cable, looping it about a bollard. From time to time a whistle was blown. Looking down, Mr. Darby saw that a slowly widening gap like a bloodless wound was opening between the ship's side and the Quay. He heard the muffled thunder of water threshed into seething commotion: then,
very gradually, the Quay and the buildings that bounded it began to move, to slip away towards the stern. The ship was under way: he was leaving England.