We got alongside the wharf after breakfast, and soon afterwards, looking through the cabin skylight, saw Ward’s tall figure, accompanied by two women, hurrying along the embankment through the driving rain.
‘He’s brought the girls,’ I said, in surprise.
‘Bother!’ said Voogdt. ‘But perhaps it’s just as well. May as well have all parties present.’
I watched them go into the office together, and shortly afterwards Cheyne called down to us to say they were expecting us.
Voogdt shook his head. ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘We’ll meet them on our own ground, here in the cabin. I’m shy of the whole lot of them since that scare the Germans gave me. Come aboard,’ he called to Cheyne, ‘and bring the others with you.’
That delayed them a little, but in a few minutes they all emerged from the office door in a little group and came hurrying down the wharf. We helped them across the gangway and into the cabin, where they sat down, and then we all sat and stared at each other without a word. I don’t know which of the six of us was most embarrassed, but if anyone of them felt worse than myself I’m sorry for him.
I say ‘him’ advisedly, for neither of the two girls showed a trace of nervousness. When I made some bungling remark about the filthy weather and asked them if I should take their cloaks, Pamily Brand tittered aloud and then tried to look preternaturally solemn. As for Miss Lavington, she slipped off her dripping wraps with a smile and handed them to me as though she were entering the box of a theatre. That was their air; they might have been just onlookers at a play. I could understand it of the Brand girl, she being only a small shareholder, and besides, for all her ease of manner, I thought I saw the light of war in her eyes; but it gave me a good impression of Miss Lavington’s nerves that she could be so tranquil and composed. As for me, I felt like a pickpocket caught in the act, and Cheyne looked hangdog enough to be my accomplice.
Ward led off, blinking curiously at Voogdt through his spectacles.
‘Mr Voogdt? How do you do? I wish I could honestly say I was pleased to make your acquaintance.’
Voogdt nodded with a smile, not in the least perturbed.
‘You may even come to that in time,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I’m sorry to be in the role of blackmailer on our first meeting, but I hope to prove myself a useful member of the syndicate later on. I’m glad to meet you, in any case. I’ve read that paper of yours on Emil Fischer and his work, and it interested me very much.’
The Brand girl peeped sideways wickedly at Ward to see how he took this form of attack, but he took no more notice of her than of Voogdt.
‘Are we here to say pretty things to each other or to talk business?’ he asked dryly. ‘Are we to understand you ask a sixth share each?’
‘No, no. One-sixth share between us.’
‘And how much time do you give us for considering your offer?’
‘No time at all. I’m sorry to hold a pistol at your heads in this way, but I needn’t point out to you that this business is—well, somewhat precarious, need I?’
‘Lord, no!’ said Ward, with a half-comic half-rueful grimace. ‘We are to understand, then, that your price is one-sixth share in this concern from this date?’
‘That’s so. We don’t want to meddle with your accumulated profits. You’ve always treated us decently.’
‘Thanks. Therefore you repay us by blackmailing us. And do you propose to continue running this boat in return for your sixth share?’
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Voogdt hesitated, so I thought it my turn to cut in.
‘Yes, we’ll do that,’ I said. ‘We’re prepared to go on acting under your instructions.’
Voogdt looked round at me with his chin stuck out.
‘Not so fast,’ he said. ‘I’m making terms, not you. The present methods of trading are too wasteful. You’ll all agree there?’
They all four assented.
‘Then we must alter them a little. If my suggestions are impracticable—and we’ll decide that by the views of the majority—then we go on as before. Now—yes, or no, please?’
‘We’d like a few minutes to consider,’ said Ward.
I got up, Voogdt following my lead at once.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You can have ten minutes,’ and we went on deck together to await their decision.
After what seemed a long ten minutes Cheyne appeared at the companion, beckoning us, and we went below together.
‘We’ve no choice but to consent,’ Ward said, as soon as we were seated. ‘D’you want anything in writing?’
‘Does any partnership deed exist between you at present?’ Voogdt asked. ‘No? Then, speaking for myself, your word’s good enough for me.’
‘Let me say one thing,’ I said. ‘I’m not responsible for any share in this business, and I feel thoroughly ashamed of putting the screw on you in this way—’
‘So you ought,’ said Pamily Brand sharply, and Cheyne grunted some sort of chorus to her.
‘’Tisn’t either of you I’m thinking of,’ I went on. ‘As for you, Cheyne, I’d rob you like a shot, and I don’t suppose Miss Brand’s loss as a small shareholder is anything to cry out about. But if it’s any use apologising to you, Ward, and to Miss Lavington, I do apologise most sincerely. And I won’t touch a penny of this sixth share.’
‘Then I shall bag the lot,’ Voogdt said coolly. ‘Don’t you try and be a bigger fool than Nature made you, Jem West. They can afford it well, and we’re going to be valuable partners to the firm.’
Ward said nothing, only wrinkling up his eyes and looking at me keenly—to see if I was in earnest, I suppose; but Miss Lavington unexpectedly took Voogdt’s side.
‘I think that’s silly, Mr West,’ she said, in her lazy way. ‘We’ve quite made up our minds to paying in any case. In fact your friend might have insisted on a larger share, if he’d liked, and I don’t see how we could have refused him. If anyone is entitled to share you are, after the discomfort of this winter’s trading for us.’ Ward nodded. ‘I agree with Miss Lavington,’ he said. ‘You may take it from me, West, that I shall pay with much greater pleasure if I think you’re getting a fair share.’
Both of them were evidently sincere, and I looked at Miss Brand to see if she agreed with them. She sniffed derisively.
‘Nobody imagines you’re at the bottom of this bother,’ she said. ‘You’re too stupid. But since your partner wishes it’—she glowered at Voogdt—’I think you’re entitled to a share in the proceeds.’
‘Good enough,’ I said. ‘That’s a majority. I accept the partnership.’
‘And now,’ Ward said, turning to Voogdt, ‘we’d like to hear your suggestions.’
‘The first suggestion is that we pay off the other two boats and run only the Luck and Charity. And the next is that we sack our two paid hands and ship Mr Cheyne here as first mate.’
That upset things at once. I couldn’t see much sense in the suggestions myself but I knew Voogdt must have good reasons for them, so said nothing. Ward was silent too, and Miss Lavington only made a mild protest. But Pamily Brand was up in arms in a moment and Cheyne swore aloud. He’d be hanged if he was going coasting; he had enough to do where he was. When he’d done laying down the law, Ward cut in.
‘Reasons?’ he asked Voogdt.
‘Two good reasons. Economy’s the first. You’ve got three boats, and for a guess you’re wasting two cargoes out of every three. Is that about the figure?’
‘Very nearly.’
‘Good. Then the Luck and Charity can save ’em all. Now West and myself know what we’re doing, we can help in arranging the removals from the ports. One boat can distribute them better, too, and with less risk of suspicion. You’ve been planting the stuff too thickly. There must be heaps of it lying in nearly every port from Inverness to the Land’s End. And you’ve got to wait your chance to touch it. All that means risk.’
‘As if we didn’t know that already,’ said Cheyne contemptuously. ‘How shall we be a
ny better off if there’s less heaps to choose from?’
‘You forget there’ll be no need hoodwinking your one crew. You and I and West between us can get the stuff shifted. With care, we shouldn’t lose one cargo in four—that’s better than two in three. And the Luck and Charity trading one week to Plymouth and the next to Sunderland won’t get noticed as much as if she was going over the same ground month after month, as she is now.’
‘That’s sense,’ said Ward. ‘Now why discharge your men?’
‘That’s the same as the second reason for paying off the other boats. I was coming to that. We’ve no right to risk any lives but our own.’
Cheyne laughed aloud. ‘Risking lives!’ he cried. ‘In the coasting trade! What a risk to be afraid of!’
Even Ward looked curious, and it was to him Voogdt addressed himself, disregarding Cheyne entirely.
‘Don’t you know of extra risks?’ he asked. ‘Would it surprise you to know we’ve had a near shave of being intentionally run down, and that I’ve had a bullet through my leg in this trade?’
I think Ward, like myself at first, thought Voogdt suffered from illusions, for he turned to me for corroboration, and I nodded and said it was quite true.
They made Voogdt tell the whole story, which he did very well, and then Ward said he thought Voogdt’s suggestions would bear consideration. Again the girls agreed; but Cheyne said nothing, which was just as well, since we were five to one against him. Voogdt’s tale had sealed the partnership. There was no longer any feeling of divided interests. I was glad to see how Ward’s opinion of him had altered.
‘We shall have to devise ways and means, Mr Voogdt,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ll find some difficulty in acting as agents ashore as well as sailors afloat. Besides, who’s to look after the business here?’
‘I’ll do that,’ said Pamily Brand, in an instant.
‘That you won’t,’ I said as quickly. ‘This is no place for a girl with those German sheds handy.’
‘They wouldn’t hurt me,’ she said.
‘They won’t get the chance. No, if you want to help, take charge of the Snow Hill office and send Carwithen here.’
Ward laughed. ‘I must really congratulate you on your knowledge of the business. How on earth did you know about Carwithen?’
I indicated Voogdt with a nod of the head.
‘He’s my general information bureau,’ I said. ‘I think he knows your business backwards.’
‘There’s one thing I don’t know,’ Voogdt said. ‘I don’t know how you discovered this stuff here. That’s puzzled me more than a little. Would you mind satisfying my curiosity?’
‘Not at all,’ said Ward, and told us the whole story, the others interrupting every now and then with comments or corrections.
It seemed that Cheyne was the accidental means of the discovery. He’d been at Ghent in one of Warbeck’s vessels loading for Rio, and whilst his boat was waiting to be let out of Terneuzen Locks he slipped ashore to have a final drink before they sailed. By some means or other—I suppose he’d been saying farewell more than once—he dropped his watch over the embankment, and, flying open as it fell, the inner case got coated with mud. The watch, a good English lever, went on working, so instead of wiping the mud off, he used to show it about as a curiosity—letting people see what a fine watch he had, to work with dried mud all over its vitals. On his return from that voyage he was holidaying in Birmingham and called at Mason College to take his cousin, Pamela Brand, out to lunch. Miss Lavington and Ward joined them, and with two students and one professor present the talk of the table drifted round to chemistry. Cheyne, thinking to puzzle Ward, scraped a little of the mud from inside his watch and defied Ward to tell him what it was. Ward took it away, analysed it and pronounced it to be nearly pure wolframite.
Even then Cheyne only laughed at him. He was too big a fool to appreciate the value of the discovery. But the others soon convinced him of that, and, once persuaded, it was his suggestion that they should try to do a deal in the stuff. His methods were crude: at first he was all for just loading Miss Lavington’s steamers with the mud and selling it openly. However, they soon saw that game wouldn’t answer, and Ward and Cheyne between them devised the plan of hiring small coasters and shipping the mud as ballast. Miss Lavington sold her steamers to provide the necessary capital, and for eighteen months all had gone well, and would have been going well even now if it hadn’t been for Ward’s mistaking me for the average coasting skipper, with a taste for liquor to boot.
‘Do you mean to tell me that all this embankment is solid wolframite?’ Voogdt asked, amazed.
‘Far from it. It only occurs in patches, so far as we’ve been able to discover. Of course we couldn’t attempt anything like a survey. That would have attracted attention at once. When I first came out here to look into the matter I pretended to be botanising and got most of my specimens for analysis by pulling up weeds and sampling the earth that clung to their roots. Give me a scrap of paper, will you?’
I tore the fly-leaf out of a book from the little shelf over his head, and on it he drew a rough map of the wharf, embankment, and lock-gates, with part of the pasture fields behind him.
‘There,’ said he, roughly shading on one or two patches with his pencil. ‘You can see the deposits are rather scattered. The bank on this side the lock-gates is nearly pure, but it was impossible to touch that with traffic passing at every hour of the day and night. Besides, we shouldn’t have been able to take away canal embankments, of course. Thence it spreads in a fan shape into the fields behind, and then thins out and disappears. There are two other small patches between here and Terneuzen, but where these cut through the embankment we have taken care to repair the path and cover them with road metal. Then comes the deposit we’re working—a large patch, almost as rich as that forbidden piece by the locks—and another lot crops out in the fields about a quarter of a mile west of us.’
‘Now about the German sheds?’ I asked.
Ward shook his head. ‘I don’t know. The moment we decided working here we stopped taking samples. There was more here than we should ever be able to take away, and if I’d gone on collecting specimens it woud have been certain to attract attention sooner or later. And from what you tell us they certainly don’t encourage enquiries down there now. That’s the worst of the business,’ he burst out, impatiently. ‘We daren’t ask questions, or show curiosity, and all the time we’re working in the dark, not knowing what other people are thinking of us. To think this shooting business could have happened to you here right on our ground, and that we were altogether ignorant of it!’
It may seem like wasted sympathy, for he was prosperous enough now; but I thought how he must have felt, those first few months, before the initial outlay had been recovered, and I felt downright sorry for the man, knowing what he must have gone through. He had thrown up his position; it was on his advice that Miss Lavington had parted with her capital to embark in the most risky enterprise ever heard of; and discovery, which might have taken place at any moment, would have meant financial ruin for both of them. I don’t think she was the sort of woman to blame him if it had, but I wouldn’t have been in his shoes at the time, for all that.
It must have been a maddening business take it all round, despite the big profits. Remembering Pamily Brand’s ‘I hate waste,’ I began to make apologies for even her temper, for waste had been the keynote from the first. Waste of energy, waste of material and waste of money, under the most tantalising circumstances, often under their very noses. Time and again the mud-heaps had been taken away to sea by other boats as ballast just as Voogdt had guessed. Tons and tons had been removed by farmers’ carts as a top dressing for land, and railway companies had dumped hundreds more over their embankments. Sometimes port by-laws had interfered with them—out-of-date rules and regulations prohibiting the removal of ballast from the quays by land. Worst of all, they never dared to show the slightest anxiety about the stuff. Ward described his emot
ions through one long summer’s day at Looe, where he had gone to try and arrange for the removal of one consignment. In the morning he had worried because children, playing on the heap, were taking away the mud on their boots, but the afternoon brought him a sterner lesson of self-control. He had to sit and grin and bear it, whilst a gang of navvies shovelled the lot—five thousand pounds’ worth of his property—down behind the piles and planks of a new quay extension.
Cheyne topped that story by instancing the three cargoes we had taken to Dartmouth in the past nine months, not one of which, he assured us, had come to hand.
On the whole, it was with mixed emotions that we contemplated our new partnership. The matter of paying off the other boats and men was left over for later discussion; and, the rain lessening a little, Ward and the girls returned to Terneuzen, whilst Cheyne and we two set about getting off hatches and preparing our hold for the first consignment of wolframite in which we had an interest.
CHAPTER XI
OF A LADYLIKE YOUNG PERSON
IT was queer to see the change of attitude on their part after Voogdt had told his tale about the shooting business. It was as though we were accepted as partners upon a friendly basis forthwith. I thought Pamily Brand held a little aloof from me personally, but she wasn’t really unpleasant in any way, and as for Ward and Miss Lavington, they were as nice as they could be.
Cheyne sulked, certainly, but one could find excuses for him. He stood to lose most by the new arrangement, for Ward agreed with Voogdt about paying off the other boats—not at once, but each in turn, with an interval between them, so as not to excite remark—and it was decided that Cheyne should go to sea with us.
Small wonder he kicked at the prospect. Hard and fit though I was, I couldn’t call the winter cruising a trifle, and I never remember looking forward to spring as I did that year. And Cheyne was anything but fit: a year and more of shore life, self-indulgence and fuddling had knocked him all to pieces, and he was flabby, soft as a woman. So he sulked, and Miss Brand was cool to me, apparently considering me responsible for this part of the arrangements. It wouldn’t have been any good trying to lay the blame on Voogdt. He and she were hand in glove: she’d turned right round since his story was told, and in her eyes he couldn’t do wrong now. Naturally, being the clever chap he was, and she a quick-tongued hussy enough, they often squabbled; but they took a delight in it and were only the better friends for every spirited quarrel. I believe she used to come aboard on purpose, and he’d turn her accusations to chaff and her statements to nonsense, and draw her on about the Suffrage and the woman question till she was fit to swear.
The Mystery of the Mud Flats Page 13