‘And a good job too. I don’t want another winter at this trade.’
‘I don’t think you’ll get another winter of it. I shall reckon we’re lucky if the job lasts us three months longer.’
‘Think so?’
‘Something in my bones tells me so. How can it last? Our coming in was the beginning of the end. We’ve broken into a tight little family syndicate, and all of ’em have relaxed precautions a bit. Here in Erith Ward’s been aboard constantly, when there were no business reasons for him to be. We’ve been calling for him at the hotel—dining with the little Brand. I don’t say anyone’s watching us, but if they were, what would they make of all this friendship between owners and employees? What should we have said, three months ago? Then there’s Cheyne. How do we know what surprises he may have to spring on us next?’
‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘If the bottom falls out of the whole business tomorrow, I’m better off than I ever was before. And after this life it’ll be a comfort to get back to deep water again. No more slacking about out of collar for me.’
‘Same here,’ said he. ‘I’ve done right well. I’m sound in health, and I’ve got real money in the bank. But all the same I can do with some more, and I don’t intend Master Cheyne to spoil my game if I can help it. That’s what I’ve been to London for.’
‘What have you been doing there?’
‘Well—it’s as well to be prepared for contingencies In case the business looks like going pop all of a sudden I mean. With help we might at the last moment snatch, a big cargo worth having. I’ve been seeing about getting that help, at a moment’s notice, if required.’
‘How? You haven’t been talking about the matter to strangers, have you?’ I asked, in surprise.
‘Have I? Now is it likely? I’ve whipped up three of the most promising wasters in London, pitched them a yarn about the Secret Service, and they’re just hungry to come in. I spun ’em a fairy tale, all about spying on foreign coasts and a Secret Service mission disguised as a trading station. Then I took ’em one by one to my diggings, finger on lip, so to speak, and showed ’em my sea-boots and guernsey and the scar on my leg. That did it. Every one of ’em was keen as mustard after that.’
‘You’re mad!’ I said.
‘Not a bit of it. They won’t ask questions—the Secret Service wheeze’ll prevent that. And they’ll be cheap labour, for they don’t want pay, being already cursed with sufficient to live on and a bit over. They’re just idling about London, bored to death and praying for a change. You don’t know the breed.’
‘Not know wasters?’
‘Not this sort, I fancy. You know the country remittance man who won’t work, but these chaps are different. They’d like something to do, only, as I tell you, they’re cursed with incomes and so drift into becoming just men about town. They all get sick of that after a year or two, and anything like excitement’ll fetch ’em out of it quick enough. Hundreds of the breed went to South Africa—in fact, I met two of my pals out there, one in the Yeomanry and t’other pretending to be a correspondent. There was another there too, in a colonial regiment. He came into money after the war, and then came home and has been at a loose end ever since. Don’t look so sour. I’ve been as prudent as you could wish. We may not want ’em at all, and if we don’t we shan’t hear any more of ’em. If we do, you’ll find they’ll come in very useful.’
‘Jib-sheets,’ I said, and kept him busy for a while, going about every few minutes, so that he hadn’t any more time for chatter. I confess I felt very annoyed at his taking such an important step entirely off his own bat, without consulting Ward or myself.
Picking our way down the lower reaches and dodging the incoming traffic was really quite enough of a job to occupy all one’s thoughts without wasting time talking. I ought to have kept my mind on my steering and nothing else, but Voogdt’s mention of Cheyne had sent my thoughts round to Pamela Brand, and I kept wondering what she was up to now. I suppose that made me a bit absent-minded, and I must have been slack and careless over my wheel. I thought of her walking and chattering beside me, of her pretty neck at dinner the night before, and of the friendly way her eyes twinkled when she was pleased, until a violent shouting almost over my head, and Voogdt’s startled face, as he looked back at me, woke me to the fact that we were right in the track of a collier outward bound, and that she was drifting straight down on us with her engines stopped, hooting furiously.
I should have gone out of her way at once if her mate hadn’t annoyed me. He was leaning over the fo’castle rail, cursing, and when he saw I was taking notice of him he got personal.
‘Are y’ in love, bargee?’ he roared. The look-out man beside him sniggered, a sort of duty laugh, and Voogdt turned his back, suddenly becoming very engrossed in his work. That made me wild, and I lost my temper, I think. The grinning pair of fools! Being hot and angry and rather at a loss as to what to say, I perpetrated a chestnut I wouldn’t have condescended to remember in the ordinary course of things.
‘You the mate?’ I asked.
‘A sure thing I am,’ he said.
‘Then go and talk to your equals. I’m master of this craft.’
That finished him. To have that hoary-headed old wheeze flung at him—and him in an earnest hurry, too—was more than he could bear. He went aft without a word, and in a minute or two the collier began to drop back a little. Then she got under way again and tried to pass me, but every time she came up I went about and crossed her bows, and she had to stop again. Once or twice it was so near a thing that she had to go astern. Then her skipper actually did come forward to talk to me. I’d had enough of the joke by then and would have let her pass if he’d been civil; but he wasn’t, ard so I kept them stopping, and going astern, for a good four miles farther. They brought lumps of coal on the fo’castle head at last and pelted us every tine we passed under her bows, but they never hit either one of us once, and we were well past Tilbury before they had room to get by. I shouldn’t have played the fool like that if I hadn’t been annoyed with them. As it was, I felt I’d got square with that mate, and the wind taking a slant more northerly just as the river widened, I called Voogdt to the wheel and went below and got breakfast, whistling, very pleased with myself.
We held the slant till the Kentish Knock was abeam and then the wind went round to the west of north, and we had a straight run across, never touching a sheet. Cheyne was very fretful when we met. Terneuzen in winter wasn’t a comfortable shop at the best of times, and, being anxious to get the promised consignment of wolframite into his customer’s hands, he was more irritable than usual at every delay. Why had we been so long at Erith? What were those rotten fertiliser bags for? He snapped and snarled and grumbled at everything, till I felt ready to kick him. Voogdt took him in hand, smoothed him down, had grub with him, went about with an arm around his neck, so to speak, and soon had him in a more trustful mood again. By the second evening he was quite all right and asked us both to join him at dinner.
‘Make a four,’ said he, ‘and have a four-handed game of billiards afterwards.’
‘Who’s the fourth?’ I asked.
‘Van Noppen, the German manager. A decent chap that.’
Here was a shock, if you like. I recalled the last time I had seen Van Noppen, when he was full of explanations about his man’s precious gun accident, and now we two—skipper and coasting hand—were to sit at dinner with our betters. I should have started questions at once, but for a warning glance from Voogdt, who accepted the invitation for both of us and then adroitly turned the subject to the proposed theft which Cheyne was arranging at Brest.
When he had gone ashore we looked at each other, aghast. ‘What the deuce—’ we both began, and then stopped together.
‘What is the fool playing at?’ I asked.
Voogdt shook his head and got off a Latin tag about the gods first depriving of reason those they meant to destroy. ‘What is it little Miss Chattermag says? “Dropping into proverbs is a sign
of failing intellect.” That’s me. This thing beats all. Has that fool taken Van Noppen into partnership already, or only paved the way for it?’
‘What are we to do?’
‘We must feed with them, that’s certain. We can’t get out of it without exciting suspicion now. But it’ll be a gay party, by the look of it. We don’t know how much Van Noppen knows, nor what he thinks of us. That’s the hitch, really. What can he think? It would look funny to an outsider if ’twas only Cheyne and yourself dining together. But when I’m included—me, a mere coasting hand … How on earth can you smear that over to make it look natural?’
‘No good asking me,’ said I. ‘I can’t help you.’
‘I’ll ask Cheyne,’ he said, and off he went ashore at once.
When he got back he still looked anxious.
‘I can’t get any sense out of the fool. All he says is that Van Noppen knows we’re his friends and that as he’s a guest he’ll be civil. I asked him what the man would think of his having coasting hands at table, and he said he wouldn’t understand there was anything unusual in that, being a foreigner. A foreigner! Pah! I’m going to turn in and think hard.’
‘Thought of anything?’ I asked, when he re-appeared at tea-time.
‘Nothing. I can’t make head or tail of it. What was it I said to you in London river about the beginning of the end. All we can do is to behave as we did before and keep our eyes and ears open. You’re still the coasting skipper, and I’m the Cockney hand. That’s all. And tread gingerly, Jem, whatever you do. We shall have a critical audience to play to. Try and get him on to drink with you. I hadn’t better presume so far myself, I suppose?’
We might have spared ourselves the trouble of such preparations. The dinner was laid in a small back room of the hotel we always used—the hotel by the locks—and Cheyne and Van Noppen were waiting for us together when we entered the stuffy apartment. They greeted us noisily, Cheyne half drunk, and the German not much better. So far from Van Noppen objecting to Voogdt’s company, he slapped him on the back and invited him to drink immediately on our arrival.
Voogdt touched his cap, after the manner of the lowly coaster, drank the proffered glass with a ‘Best respecks, gen’lemen,’ and then stepped outside for a few moments. When he returned he was wiping his mouth, and under his arm was a box of vile cigars which he opened and placed upon the table for common consumption. A certain recklessness in his air that I hadn’t noticed before made me anxious even then, at the very start.
When dinner began I thought he’d gone mad. It was no surprise to me that Cheyne should drink spirits, or that Van Noppen, who had elected to take beer, should help it out by a bottle of schnapps at his elbow, which he drank German fashion, neat in a liqueur-glass; but it scared me when Voogdt said that was a fine notion. ‘On’y I don’t like this ’ere schnapps much, Guv’nor. I’ll ’ave whisky, same way.’ A bottle was brought in to his order and he set about it like a dipsomaniac. As for me, half dazed by the noise they made, and worrying about his behaviour, I had a bottle of light wine and sat wondering what on earth would happen next, with those three madmen carrying on like that.
By the time dinner was half over they were all flushed and talking one against the other. Voogdt still kept up some pretence of being a coasting hand, but once he contradicted Cheyne flatly, and Cheyne, with his eyes wet and bright, only laughed at the insolence and called him ‘old chap’ in replying. Van Noppen praised him incoherently for his forbearance.
‘It is goodness to be friends all,’ was his way of putting it. ‘At work—Master. Sir. Yass, all right. But with work done, drink a glass of beer brotherly. Eh?’ He was appealing to me.
‘A glass of beer,’ I said, accentuating ‘glass’ and ‘beer,’ for he was drinking spirits in bulk.
‘Or two. Three.’ He poured out and emptied another glass of neat Schiedam. ‘You dring Sauterne, Captain? No good, that. Cold veat’er, drink schnapps.
‘Or whisky,’ said Voogdt, and suited the action to the word.
‘Graves’ll do for me,’ I said sulkily. I’d never dreamed that Voogdt had this weakness, and I felt sick and sorry. It wasn’t so much the danger of exposure—though I saw that was imminent, with those fools drinking as they were—it was Voogdt himself I was sorry for. I’d often wondered whether his weak lung had been the sole reason for his going on tramp. But here was reason enough, if this was his idea of conviviality. The man was a drunkard, and I’d never discovered it till now.
By the time the last plates were cleared—the little Dutch waitress staring at us, half afraid, and keeping on my side of the table all she could—all three of them were half-seas over. Billiards? They couldn’t have stood up, leave alone hold a cue. Disgusted, I got up to go. Van Noppen and Voogdt shouted protests, but Cheyne was too far gone even for that. His head was sinking on the table as I moved towards the door, dodging the other two men when they staggered to their feet to try to stop me. By going I should spoil a merry party, they insisted, and therefore I must stay.
I was in the hall, cap in hand, saying goodnight to the landlady, when the door reopened behind me and Voogdt lurched out. He caught me by the arm and in a drunken tangle of Dutch, German and English began trying to persuade me not to go. I snatched my sleeve from him, opened the hotel door and was out in the night without answering him, when he made another lurch and stumbled after me.
‘Stop and see it out, you born fool,’ he said, in a sober, vicious whisper. ‘I’m drinking cold tea’; and before I’d got the sense of the words into my head he had relapsed again.
‘I’m aw’ right,’ he insisted loudly, as if I had tried to get him away. ‘Le’s go back an’ ’ave another. I’m aw’ right, I tell yer. Aw’ right. Where’s my ol’ pal, Van Noppen?’
He was just behind us, having followed Voogdt into the hall. He also was evidently very drunk, his fair hair hanging in straight locks over his forehead and his collar unfastened, but he was quiet, and quite ready to go back and resume the fuddling. Voogdt wriggled himself free of my hold and stood swaying, and then, embracing Van Noppen, the pair went back to the sitting-room again, where I followed them with my brain in a whirl.
Cheyne had gone to sleep in his chair, his arms out across the table and his head upon them, snoring heavily. A candlestick, upset by his elbow, was still fuming, its wick spluttering and stinking in a pool of grease upon the tablecloth. Van Noppen extinguished it with the bottom of an empty tumbler—and now that my dull wits were waking I noticed he did it without a slip or lurch—and then shook Cheyne by the arm, shouting in his ear:
‘Wake oop,’ he cried. ‘Wake oop an’ ’ave anot’er.’
Cheyne opened his eyes and looked up, utterly unconscious of his surroundings. He emptied the glass Van Noppen held to his lips, and looked around at us, his eyes set and stupid, with no trace of recognition in them, his head lolling from side to side. ‘’Ave another, you chaps,’ he muttered, and collapsed again, snoring and gurgling in his throat.
Van Noppen remained stooping over him, listening to the noises he made, for perhaps half-a-minute. Watching him from behind I could see, now that my suspicions were aroused, that his attitude was intent and alert, not in the least the attitude of a drunken man. Quick as I could I dipped a finger in his glass of schnapps and put it in my mouth, and it was tasteless—only water! Voogdt, watching me, lifted one eyebrow drunkenly, and quicker than it takes to tell I made an H with my hands in deaf-and-dumb language, then held up two fingers, and then made an O, as before. Even as I did it the thought struck me that H2O something resembled WO2, and wondered if he’d understand. But he did—trust him—and nodded drunkenly, babbling something to Van Noppen about sitting down and ‘’aving another.’
Then, at last, I saw how things stood. Underneath all this noise and folly a duel of wits was going on between Voogdt and Noppen. Cheyne and myself had been equally out of it, and Cheyne being now out of action altogether, it was up to me to bear a hand.
I had scarcely ma
de up my mind what to do when Van Noppen rose erect, having satisfied himself, I suppose, that Cheyne need no longer be taken into account He played his part as before, and I took advantage of it as best I could, getting in his way and letting him knock me sideways with his first lurch. As I staggered I caught at the table as if to support myself—and his bottle of water was smashed on the floor.
‘Be more careful,’ I said, as though angry at his clumsiness. Voogdt took no more notice than to laugh vacantly, and proffer a drink from his own bottle. He dared that, when acceptance would have meant instant discovery.
But so far we were evidently to windward of Van Noppen. I was strung up to real interest in the game by that time, and it was rich to watch Voogdt pressing him to share the alleged whisky, and his guarded refusals.
‘Whisky on schnapps? No goot,’ he said, and pretended to hiccup. Oh, he played his game, well, too, past denying. He wanted to fetch another bottle of schnapps, but here I interfered again. I wouldn’t let him get it. Both he and Voogdt had had enough, I said, and Voogdt was to come aboard with me. He refused flatly. He didn’t care a curse for me or anybody else, and he was going to stay with his old pals and make a night of it. Why wouldn’t I stay and be jolly? Van Noppen joined him in drunken persuasions, and eventually I consented with as ill a grace as I could manage. As I’d smashed his bottle I supposed I must pay for another, and before he could offer to fetch it, I’d rung the bell. And when it came in I had the first drink. It was schnapps this time, all right.
I’d drunk with Germans before, and I knew we should whack him when it came to spirits. They’re accustomed to light beer, but they’re a temperate people, else. He’d had a fair amount of beer already—beer and water alternately—and I’d had the best part of a bottle of Graves, so we started about level; and now I knew I could rely on Voogdt I didn’t worry so much about myself. We both kept him at it as hard as we could, and by midnight he was as nearly drunk as ever I’ve seen a man. My head was humming a bit, and I wanted to talk, but I had the sense to keep off business topics. As for Voogdt, he looked awful—sprawling all over the table, and singing and shouting by turns.
The Mystery of the Mud Flats Page 19