‘Environment. I think it was a clever plan, Lucy. But rather a leap in the dark. The new environment might be all in favour of one of the others. And then where would you be?’
‘Nowhere, I’d be nowhere, as likely as not. But you have to take a chance. And I’m the real one, after all. I think I’ve got most chance in the end. If I didn’t feel that I’d drown myself – and them.’
‘You mustn’t do that. Nor that either; Mr. Hudspith wouldn’t like it’ – and Appleby removed her hand from under his chin. ‘Tell me, Lucy – why did you never go to a doctor?’
‘A doctor?’ She stared at him. ‘I’m never ill.’
‘I see.’ Real Lucy was so intelligent and so competently spoken that one could forget the absolute and crippling ignorance general in the Rideout world. ‘It will be dinner time in five minutes.’ He had looked at his watch by the gently swaying lamp. ‘Lucy, what do you think is Wine’s game? Has anything ever happened that has given you any idea of what he’s really about?’
She looked serious – so serious that Appleby thought for a moment that sick Lucy had returned. ‘He gets together other people who – who are different.’
‘I know that.’
‘And also–’ She broke off. ‘Jacko – John, I mean – did you meet a man called Beaglehole? Yes? Well, he’s one sort of man I understand – though it’s not the sort that my sort of girl sees much of. Beaglehole is money. He does everything for money – just for the sake of the idea of having it. Wine is different. I expect he wants money too. But he wants something else much more. He’s the kind that takes hold of you hard and pushes you about until you’re just how he wants you. But also he’s not.’
‘Not?’
‘Not that. I’ve said he’s not that. He’s that and different.’ Real Lucy was struggling with some difficult abstract conception. ‘It’s as if’ – she paused over this unusual piece of syntax – ‘it’s as if he felt like that not about a girl, or about girls, but – well about everything.’
‘You mean that he has a terrific desire for power.’
‘Oh, John, I knew you were clever.’ She touched him on the ear. ‘If only–’
Above the plash of the paddles there sounded the chime of a little silver bell. And Lucy Rideout sprang to her feet. ‘Oh, Mr Appleby, isn’t it fun having dinner so late! When it’s dark! And will there be melon?’ She clapped her hands. ‘The little, round, baby melons?’
And Appleby followed young Lucy below.
3
Like a paradox tiresomely sustained, the river widened day after day as the little steamer puffed and paddled towards its source. The river widened, but was filled with treacherous shoals; they kept now to mid-channel, and sometimes there was a water horizon on either bow. Once they passed a canoe with fishermen – men brown and naked and lean – and once so many canoes that Mr Wine had a case of rifles brought on deck. But it was an uneventful voyage.
The days were hot, and by night there was a soft warmth under brilliant stars. Mosquitoes did not come out so far; the decks were clear of curtains and the awnings disappeared at dinner time; later the crew assembled on the fo’c’sle deck and chanted to the sound of a sinister little drum. Hudspith more than once remarked that the alligators were becoming sparser – but without appearing to derive much comfort from the fact. Perhaps his melancholy was coming upon him again. As he had spent much time on the liner staring out over the prow, so now he would gaze fixedly over the stern and down the double wake of the steamer. Appleby supposed that the old Sirens were operating. In Buenos Aires Hudspith had once been on terms of most profitable co-operation with the chief of police; in Rio there had occurred a notable sequel to his most famous clean-up in Cardiff. And he was growing thinner, Appleby thought; so that the alligators stood to lose by further delay.
And other things might be suspected to be growing thinner: notably the story about Radbone, the rival scientist. Not through want of the sort of sustenance which one might conceive to be afforded by the steady accumulation of circumstantial detail. Wine had quite fallen into the habit of embroidering on Radbone. There was a regular saga about the man, and one with sufficient interior consistency to speak much for the intellectual powers of the story-teller who lazily and extemporaneously produced it. Unfortunately Appleby and Hudspith were scarcely in a position to give it the dispassionate appraisal of literary critics; the saga had a sort of aura of alligator which made it uncomfortable hearing. Nevertheless something useful emerged. Emery Wine was a conceited man.
He had trapped them. He knew that they were policemen concerned with Lucy Rideout and Hannah Metcalfe and perhaps other aspects of his affairs; he believed that he had dissimulated this knowledge and convinced them of his conviction that they were emissaries of a rival scientist – a rival scientist whom he had invented for the purpose of his trap. He was unaware that his explanations were a little too bland and his stories a little too tall. In fact he had underestimated the perspicacity of his opponents. But then he could afford to neglect the possibility that this was so. Duped or aware, they were caught. His own problematical stronghold was in front, and behind were hundreds and hundreds of miles of the alligator-infested river.
But Wine was conceited; and the fact was interesting even if not helpful. If he was a wrong ’un he was a wrong ’un on a large scale – on the largest scale that wrong ’uns can achieve, it might be. But he was not, as the largest wrong ’uns commonly are, of the double-guarded, cautious and invulnerable sort. He gave rein to an imagination in the matter of Radbone. And imagination might destroy him yet.
There would be something of imagination in a plan for building up here, in some fastness remote from global warfare, a great organization for the study of the teasing borders of natural knowledge. The voices speaking through Mrs Nurse, the roguery and hypothetical something else in Eusapia, the ancient business of Mr Smart and the yet more ancient business of Colonel Morell: these were all but scattered examples of that class of phenomena commonly called supernatural – phenomena never perhaps convincingly and massively demonstrated but yet clinging obstinately to the fringes of human belief in almost every country and age. A spiritualist ‘seance’ behind the closed curtains of a modern drawing room has very little to commend itself to an educated mind: the spirits communicate only a nauseous twaddle, and the physical manifestations have constantly the air of – and frequently a proved source in – a trivial if ingenious conjuring. It is only when the student or investigator takes wider ground, when he finds amid remote times and cultures startlingly analogous performances with the identical residuum of stubbornly unaccountable fact, that he may come to be impressed. A group of scientists, puzzled by some ‘paranormal’ manifestation in twentieth-century London, finds that in seventeenth-century Africa this identical quirk or quiddity in nature has puzzled Jesuit missionaries as intelligent, as acute and as sceptical as themselves. The rub is there. The rub is there, thought Appleby – and from this pervasiveness of the thing rather than from any impressiveness in individual instances does it maintain its status as a legitimate field for scientific inquiry. And there would be something of imagination in a plan for large-scale assault upon this shadowy corner of the universe.
It had never been done. Rather oddly if one considered the momentous issues which could conceivably be held involved, it had never been done. Here and there had come an endowment for such hitherto irregular investigations – but always, it would appear, there had been mismanagement or ineptitude, and the effort had faded out. Telepathy, for instance, had been studied experimentally and at considerable expense. But the investigators – Radbones of a sort, as it would seem – had inadequately meditated the terms of their problem, so that the results presented merely a new field for dispute. And yet in this strange and baffling branch of knowledge the time was probably ripe for some major clarification, and there would be imagination in a really big drive on it.
Yet all this was nothing – or was little – to Emery Wine.
&nb
sp; Big industrialists, Appleby said to himself as he looked out across the unending river, are accustomed to keep a few ‘pure’ scientists in a back room. In their private and cultivated capacities they may even patronize them a little from time to time. Nevertheless the status of these workers is low; they are kept for the purpose of rounding an occasional awkward technical corner, and if they make a ‘discovery’ they are likely to see it promptly locked up in their cultivated patron’s safe – ‘discoveries’ being as likely as not to jar the wheels of industry. And so perhaps it might be with Wine and any genuine science which his industry might support. For Wine had – or was going to have – an industry. That was the point. And the men in the back room were not going to be very important. Unless, perhaps, some unforeseen crisis came. There was that to be said for a world in the melting-pot. It sometimes turned the back room into the first-floor front.
There were men who would take the sword and with it conquer the world for their countrymen or themselves. Such men were a nuisance always, and in a world of high-explosive they were a calamity. But always history – a sentimental jade – would give them a little glory: that amid an ocean of tears and blood. Emery Wine was planning a conquest conceivably just as extensive. But decidedly there would be no glory. To few men – thought Appleby, looking sombrely out over the river – had there ever come a plan more absolutely bad.
There were men who had attempted to make what is called a corner in some necessity of life – say in wheat. But to this man had come the conception of making a corner in poison. The thing had a gambling element, as such cornerings commonly have: Wine had to bank on calamity and a gathering darkness. But the plan was clear. It was as if in the fourth century of our era, watching the decline and fall of world order in the empire of Rome, some cunning man had concentrated in his own hands all the promising superstitions, the long-submerged and half-forgotten magical instruments of the twilight ages of the mind.
And yet it was not quite like that; the conditions were different. Today order and science and the light of knowledge might go, but in the chaos there would remain a network of swift communications, a wilderness of still turning and pounding and shaping machines. The great presses would still revolve and the radios blare or whisper. Whole systems of mumbo-jumbo would spread with terrifying rapidity: already were not weird systems of prediction, grubbed up from the rubble of the dark ages, printed by the million every day? Grant but the initial collapse on which this bad man was counting, and the spread of sub-rational beliefs would be very swift. Power would go to him who had the most and likeliest instruments of superstition to hand. And here – were one’s organization sufficiently vast and sufficiently efficient – even a comical cab-horse, even an inwardly riven and tormented cockney girl, might have a useful niche in the new and murky temple. A corner in ghosts, a corner in witches, a corner in denkende Tiere. Somewhere in front of this hot and stinking little river steamer lay the first concrete fashioning of this vast and corrosive fantasy. Round any bend now they might come upon the unholy base or depot, the laboriously accumulated reservoirs of the Lucys and Hannahs and Daffodils – unaccomplished works of Nature’s hand, abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed. The project, if he had read it aright, was extravagant beyond the compass of a story-teller’s art. And yet it was not ungrounded in the present state of the world. As a commercial venture it was dangerous; perhaps what the city used to call double dangerous. But one could write a tolerably persuasive prospectus for it should such a bizarre job come one’s way.
Take the Bereavement Sentiment – take that, said Appleby to himself as he watched young Lucy fishing from the side. There are graphs of it, for insurance companies as well as sociologists find such things useful. The peak year in western Europe was 1920. And it was at that time that the papers were full of strange elysiums, cigar-and-whisky empyreans, revenants who reported lawn tennis tournaments on the pavements of paradise. And it was at about that time that such bodies as did exist for the objective study of psychical evidences were inundated with members themselves far from objectively disposed. There are times when every man prays, whatever his settled belief or disbelief may be. And there are circumstances in which many men, and many women – And here Appleby stopped. The best thing, perhaps, would be to go below, and knock on the door of Wine’s cabin, and enter, and shoot him dead, and possibly achieve the additional satisfaction of pitching his carcass to the alligators before his retainers interfered. That – thought Appleby with his eye still on Lucy Rideout – would be very nice. Only the train of speculation leading up to it might be all wrong after all. In a way it ought to be all wrong. The comedy of Lady Caroline and Bodfish, the episode of the York antique shop, the extravagant disappearance of 37 Hawke Square, the deplorable adventure of the birthday party, the untoward consequences of the electrical storm: none of these things alone had the quality – had anything of the key or tone – of this to which they were leading up. Nevertheless Appleby felt that the truth was assuredly here. An examination of the facts led to it as certainly as the long reaches of this river led to Wine’s Happy Islands. And the mere scale of the thing made it susceptible of no other explanation.
But the man had miscalculated, Appleby thought. He was banking on what intellectuals of a high-flown kind liked to call the End of our Time. The probability was that this itself was a miscalculation. It is true that times do come to an end, but the thing happens far less frequently than people expect. History is full of periods which appeared to contemporaries agonal and conclusive, but which the textbooks were eventually to describe as no more than uncomfortably transitional. Now things were uncomfortable enough, and for the first time since the creation every continent and every sea was under fire. But in the end of his time or his country, his language or his civilization or his race, Appleby was not very disposed to believe. If Wine was counting on that sort of absolute subversion he had probably made a mistake.
Conceivably, however, all this was to attribute too great an imaginative element to his schemes. Under whatever circumstances the guns ceased fire, and whatever of his foundations Western man preserved, in the remaining superstructure there would for long be confusion and darkness, wildered wits and shaken judgements enough. Once more, it simply came to this: had a bold man but his organization ready he could reap an immense harvest of wealth and power.
Think of Sludge. Appleby rose from his chair and paced the little deck. Think of the original of Browning’s charlatan. In the midst of the immense solidity of the Victorian age he had been able to work up an extremely profitable hysteria in places astoundingly close to the very centres of English culture. Noblemen had solemnly sworn before committees that they had seen him float in and out of windows or carry live coals in his hand about the drawing-rooms of Mayfair. And the tone of all that – England’s first spiritualist epidemic – was most oddly like the tone of more recent movements. In the period between the wars, a period in which much of stability had already gone, it had proved possible to build up – and in the same dominant social class – hysterias of essentially the same kind. This time it had not been spooks; rather it had been a species of cocktail and country-house revivalism even more antipathetic to the rational mind. But the tone was the same; one had only to read the documents to realize that. And it showed what could be done. The ranks of these unstable and disorientated revivalists were full of persons of earnest purpose and sincere conviction. But doubtless the gentlemen who had sworn to the levitating Sludge had been like that. The thing was not thereby the less aberrant, the less dangerous to all that Western man had achieved. And now, should Wine get going –
‘So here we are.’
Appleby turned and found his host beside him, pointing over the prow.
‘Welcome, my dear Appleby. Welcome to the Happy Islands.’
4
‘My own headquarters,’ said Wine, ‘are on America Island.’
‘America Island?’ Appleby was gazing far up the river. There appeared to be a land horizon
straight ahead.
‘Yes. It is the largest of the islands. And then comes Europe Island. Perhaps you will be most interested in that. Particularly in English House. You see, we have found it best to organize our research on a continental, and then on a national or state basis. On America Island, for instance, different groups concentrate on the problems and – ah possibilities of different parts of the continent. Would Radbone have carried the thing thus far? I think not.’
‘Almost certainly not, I should say.’
Wine nodded, seemingly much pleased. ‘Take the Deep South, my dear Appleby. The problems are naturally quite different from, say, those of New England. And so we have a Deep South House and a New England House, with a competent man in charge of each. You must prepare yourself for something on quite a considerable scale. We have been at work for a long time.’
‘I see. Would it be right to say that the collecting of material, as you call it, has gone a good way ahead of the actual investigation?’
‘Well, as a matter of fact, it has.’ Wine had glanced swiftly at Appleby. ‘When I speak of having competent men in charge of each section I am thinking in terms of field workers rather than of first-rate laboratory men. The material is getting somewhat out of hand. Particularly in German House.’
‘Indeed?’
‘It ought really to be called German Mews.’ Wine gave a gay little chuckle. ‘Most of the thinking Animals are there – our friend Daffodil among them. Germany was always the great place for that sort of thing. You must have a calculating horse or prescient pig if you want really to impress a Prussian academy of science. And at present we have, I must confess, nobody who really understands the creatures, or can make any headway with their investigation. And that is just an example.’ Wine, now gloomy, shook his head. ‘Scientists are frankly short with us. And Radbone has some of the best men.’ He paused. ‘Which is why, you know, I asked you and Hudspith to come and see.’
The Daffodil Affair Page 13