Tales of Adventurers

by Geoffrey Household

Henry stayed on guard over the barrels – and again our excuse that he would not be separated from his animals sounded pretty feeble, though it happened to be true. The rest of us trooped into the farmhouse for lunch. Redworth did us well, with a pre-war hospitality. When the port had circulated, he remarked:

  “I was born in La Paz.”

  “How romantic!” said Petronilla, who had been cooing at him for some time. “Where is it?”

  “In Bolivia. On top of the Andes.”

  “Our experience,” I said quickly, “Petronilla’s and mine, I mean, has been wholly in Central Asia.”

  “But your Exploration Society?” he asked. “I suppose it’s all planned by experts on the Andes?”

  Tony immediately began to throw around the names of patrons and financiers, keeping carefully off geography. The trouble was that we had thought of everything except looking up some patter on the Andes.

  “You’re going to the Montaña, of course?” Redworth insisted.

  He said it as if there were no other possible territory for exploration, so we agreed.

  “With those ponies?”

  “They have been specially selected by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons for high-altitude work,” said Tony impressively.

  “Then they certainly won’t live long in the Montaña. And why do your people go to the expense of shipping ponies, when you could get mules on the spot? Don’t think me rude,” he added, “but I know the country.”

  I won’t spin out the agony. Even when Petronilla pretended her garter had broken, she couldn’t head him off. Redworth found out just how much we knew about the Andes, and kept circulating bottles.

  “Now, look here, boys and girls,” he said at last, “I’m only a farmer, but I’ve knocked around the world a bit. What’s the racket? And let me say that whatever it is I think you’re sports.”

  Petronilla is a clever girl. She stopped Tony just as he had started on a marvelous story about selling pack ponies for mountain guns in Palestine.

  “Tell him the truth,” she said. “He’s going to laugh.”

  Tony and I looked fools, so she didn’t wait. She told him the whole venture right from the beginning, and it didn’t lose in the telling. When she dealt with our March voyages to and from the Loire, I felt like Sir Francis Drake.

  “And you’re going to give this stuff to some black marketeer at three quid a liter, when he’ll sell it at seven?” he asked. “What you poor fish need is a marketing board. Now, Rancy, is this stuff drinkable?”

  “If it’s the same as we tasted in the shipper’s office,” I said, “it’s good, and we’ll get four pounds easy.”

  “If it’s the same as you tasted!” Redworth exclaimed. “Do you chaps trust the first fellow who comes along?”

  “Any complaints?” Petronilla asked.

  Well, that made him chuckle. Then we went out and prized Henry off the barrels, where he was sitting as obstinately as a broody hen, and tapped one.

  “I imagine,” said Redworth, running the brandy over his palate, “that this is what you tasted.”

  He drew himself another, and lectured us on the decay of country life. You were not allowed petrol, he said, to visit your neighbors; and, when you broke the law and did visit them, there was little or nothing to drink. We revived, he told us eloquently, the glories of the past when every country gentleman defied the government, and filled his cellars and dressed his wife off the backs of the pack horses.

  We had another all round, and he began to declaim Kipling in a voice that was far too loud even for the heavy barn doors which contained us:

  Five and twenty ponies,

  Trotting through the dark,

  Brandy for the parson,

  Baccy for the clerk.

  Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie –

  Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by!

  “Can I have the rest of that puncheon at five pounds a liter?”

  “Six,” said Tony.

  “I’ll make it five ten,” he offered, “and we’ll talk business for future shipments. Why the hell should those spivs in London have all the good stuff while we have to put up with government port in the country? I’m going to form a syndicate. There’s a lot of money in this district since we found out how to keep dairy cattle on the open downs all the year round.”

  Redworth thought that his local market could consume the product of two more trips – and two more were certainly all we dared undertake. People would begin to wonder why the Society’s ponies needed so much practice.

  As for our march to the London suburb, he suggested that we should call it off then and there.

  “Send your tubs up by rail,” he proposed, “two by two from different stations. Stencil your preposterous Society’s name all over them, and mark them Spoiled Stores for Analysis! The only risk is that one of them might be holed, and that’s very unlikely if you put them on a passenger train yourselves.”

  We took his advice, and sent the nine remaining tubs by four different routes. Tony’s firm of importers disliked sending their plain van all round London to pick up the cargo, and I gather they approached the barrels pretty cautiously; but they collected them, and they paid out at three ten.

  The next trip was uneventful. No story in it at all. Antigua had a fine run out, with a change of wind just when we wanted it, and there was calm all over the western Atlantic on the way back. That came a bit heavy on the Diesel fuel, but we didn’t worry. We had earned, so Petronilla said, twelve hundred pounds clear profit on the first trip, and – with a guaranteed market at five pounds the liter – we stood to make two thousand on this. The cross-country march was a picnic. We kept clear of Redworth’s farm, to avoid any connection between him and us, and unloaded in a remote barn belonging to one of the syndicate, where we rebuilt a potato clamp over the top of the barrels. They were ten-liter puncheons this time, to make distribution easier.

  Redworth met us at the barn, and paid in pound notes on the spot. He said that half a dozen country houses were taking the stuff, and that two tubs – just to keep up the tradition – were going to the cathedral close in Salisbury. The next cargo, he told us, had been largely ordered by the lawyers and land agents, and he had a request for a small lot of the finest armagnac obtainable at almost any price we liked to ask.

  He was a queer fellow, Redworth. Tony says I am wrong, but I swear he never took a penny profit – and Petronilla agrees with me. He was a passionate country lover, and he was determined to take some of the melancholy out of country life. And then, of course, if you have been born in a Latin civilization, you have no patience with governments which put punitive taxes on the juice of the grape. He didn’t object to paying for what he wanted; he just resented the utter incompetence of government buyers. In questions of drink he was a pure idealist.

  Tony was all against running a third cargo into the Coombe River. Petronilla and I, who had less respect for the Customs, disagreed. We insisted that the first trip did not count, for the ponies, owing to the luck of our quick passage and Henry’s eye for weather, had come and gone in the dark, and had never been seen near the coast at all. Antigua was not suspected. The yacht club had even invited us to serve on the regatta committee.

  Down in the Loire we had no trouble, and loaded up some first-class expensive wallop for those lawyers and land agents. We lost the jib and, very nearly, me off the Lizard, but George fished me out as I came roaring along the lee quarter on top of a sea. Meanwhile Tony was having one scare after another.

  On the second trip he had, of course, called on the local landowner, and obtained his permission to exercise the Society’s ponies on his hillsides. The steep wooded slopes, he said, were just the practice ground we needed to test the ponies for the Montaña. We knew all about the Montaña now from Redworth.

  That second cargo had been landed in heavy rain, and the path through the woods, which at first had been hard, was thoroughly churned up. Tony thought it wise to find out ho
w much the owner had noticed before he committed himself to those woods for a third time.

  He left Henry and the ponies a day’s march away, and went to pay a call at the big house in the most correct naval manner. The landowner was cordial as could be, but much too curious; he was puzzled by the hoof-marks.

  “I see you give your ponies more weight coming uphill,” he said. “What do you load them with?”

  “Water,” Tony replied.

  He says that he fired the answer straight back, but I’ll bet there was a good deal of humming and hawing and hesitation.

  “We pack it in skins,” Tony explained, “to find out what weight they can carry on any angle of slope. Every detail is scientifically checked.”

  The man was not in the least suspicious, but it was certain that the whole district would know that the Society had taken its pack ponies down to the water, and certain that the Customs would wonder why. In the country an exciting visitor such as the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society is a heaven-sent topic for conversation.

  When the local sergeant of police deliberately came up to the camp for a longish chat, Tony told him plenty about weights and angles, and added that this was the last journey before the expedition embarked for South America and that the ponies were moving back towards London the next day. The sergeant went away happy, but the game was up.

  Tony had to work fast, for we were due in a couple of days. The first, immediate essential was to send Henry and the ponies twenty more miles to the east; and that he did. He said good-bye to the landowner and other casual friends around the Coombe River, and thanked them for their help and courtesy. In our experience there’s no man or woman in England – especially if not asked for a subscription – who isn’t thrilled to help explorers.

  For us in Antigua it was always nervous work creeping upriver in the dark, for we couldn’t tell what might have happened while we were away. We were ready for any disaster; so it was not altogether a surprise when we nearly ran down Tony in a hired dinghy as we were about to change course into the creek. He had been out there for two nights pretending to fish. I told you that ours was not an easy way to earn a living.

  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 MACGINNIS’ MAMMOTH FAIR, 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 men
tioned.

  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:

  THE RETURN OF THE PACK HORSE. THE BRITISH IMPERIAL ANDEAN EXPLORATION SOCIETY EXERCISING ITS PONIES.

  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!