The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife

by Martin Armstrong

  He replaced his spectacles now, the world cleared itself and he looked about him. Where was he? And where was he going? Ah, a Bass. He was going in search of a Bass. That meant that he must visit a public-house. He looked about him more particularly. There was no public-house in sight, and anyhow he could not run the risk of being seen entering or leaving a public-house in this part of the town, where he was likely to be known. A brief but vivid scene took place in his imagination. He was leaving a public-house. He pushed open the door, it swung to with a bump behind him, he hurried out into the street and ran straight into … Mr. Marston. Mr. Marston glared at him in amazement and disgust and passed on his way without a word. And rightly so, thought Mr. Darby, shuddering at the fancy; for people in positions like his own did not frequent pubs. Certainly not. And Mr. Marston who was ready enough to condone and even sympathize with a … ah … festive occasion, would certainly not countenance that. But this time the visit must be paid, for he was in search not of pleasure but of a remedy, a remedy strongly recommended for the little trouble from which he was suffering.

  Then a bright idea struck him. The Quayside! The very thing! He would go down—he had already, it seemed, been unconsciously going down—to the Quayside and visit a public-house there, for there he could do so with comparative safety. And that would kill two birds with one stone, because he loved the Quayside: among the ships and warehouses and cranes, with the river gliding by and the trains thundering across the High Level Bridge overhead, Mr. Darby tasted the romance and adventure of the unknown. The North Sea, London, the Channel, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, the Pacific. the Equator,—they were all in the air that blew along the narrow and smoky valley of the Dole. To breathe that air now would do for his heart and mind what McNab had guaranteed that the Bass would do for his body. Accordingly Mr. Darby put himself in motion once more, but his pace was now steadier and more becoming than it had been before. He was aware of himself now, aware of the town through which he moved, aware of the shop-windows which resumed their customary duty of ministering to his sense and his imagination. As he turned down the precipitous Cliff Street a cold wind blew up from below, redolent of the river, and Mr. Darby’s heart thrilled.

  A few minutes later the Cathedral struck the third quarter past noon as he stepped on to the Quayside. As usual his first glance was for the shipping, the thicket of masts and rigging, deck cabins and funnels and bridges, that lined the edge of the Quay. Beyond them, in the fairway, a grimy tug, tall funnel raked as if by the force of its movement, thrust its way powerfully through the steel-bright water, drawing, as it seemed, the whole river after it. The smoke-blackened walls and roofs of Portshead, piled upon the opposite bank, the austere smoke-blackened church standing high above them, frowned across at their neighbour Newchester. High above the squat little Swing Bridge towered the black High Level on which trains and road traffic (the first above the second) rumbled across between town and town.

  With a deep, satisfied sigh Mr. Darby turned his gaze from these enthralling scenes and glanced along the line of haphazard, old-fashioned shops and stores that faced the river. Not twenty yards from where he stood he caught sight of what he sought,—a public-house The Schooner. Without more ado, he made for it and, having reached it, threw a rapid glance up, then down, the street and darted in.

  Mr. Darby was unaccustomed to public-houses: he had been taught, from childhood, to regard them as the homes of drunkenness and disorder. More than once, it is true, he had visited the bar in the Central Station Refreshment Room and taken a glass of port with a friend, but that was altogether a different matter. He had entered The Schooner, therefore, with a certain amount of trepidation, but he was somewhat reassured as soon as he got inside, for the low-ceilinged room in which he found himself was clean, comfortable, and inviting. The bar was rather crowded, and it took Mr. Darby some time to work his way to the front where he found himself face to face with a rather shockingly magnificent barmaid. She ignored Mr. Darby, for she was occupied in conversation with a man who stood beside him and it was not for half a minute or so that she deigned to drop a supercilious eye on him.

  ‘A Bass, if you please!’ said Mr. Darby with a touch of loftiness; but his loftiness was as nothing beside hers. She handled bottle, glass, and change with the aloofness of a duchess. Her cold unresponsiveness recalled Sarah’s manner at breakfast that morning and Mr. Darby felt a dumb indignation stir in him. But not for long, for the Bass stood before him, and the Bass and not the barmaid was his concern at the moment. He raised it to his lips, tasted it and, as a result of the experiment, half emptied the glass at a single draught.

  How right, how absolutely right, McNab had been. This was precisely what he wanted: this clean, tonic bitter was what his jaded tongue and stomach had been crying out for all the morning. He smacked his lips and then pressed them tightly together. For a minute or so he surveyed the rows of bottles on the shelves behind the bar. They recalled his visit of the previous evening to Edgington’s, but he did not pursue that memory. Then among the bottles he noticed hats, faces, collars, sleeves: the shelves were backed with mirrors, and next moment his eye fell upon something he had never seen before,—to wit, Mr. William James Darby standing at a public-house bar toying complacently with a half-empty glass. He looked (he noted with displeasure) a little foolish and with a slight blush he averted his eyes from the spectacle. Then he raised his glass once more and lowered the second half of the Bass, glancing again at the Mr. Darby opposite him as he replaced his empty glass on the counter. No, he had been wrong: he looked all right, nothing ridiculous about him at all! And, after all, why should there be?

  So much for his looks. As regards his feelings, he felt magnificent. He was cured, completely cured, as right as rain. What was more, he was extremely hungry. He glanced along the counter and his eye fell upon a glass dish covered by a glass bell, under which was a pile of sandwiches. At that moment the barmaid removed his empty glass. ‘I’ll take a sandwich, please,’ he said promptly, ‘and,’ he added by an inspired afterthought, ‘another Bass.’

  ‘Ham or beef?’ said the barmaid.

  ‘One of each,’ said Mr. Darby.

  What an admirable place! How providential that he had happened upon it so casually! What excellent-looking sandwiches! His mouth was watering: he could hardly wait till the barmaid put the plate in front of him. And another Bass: that had been an inspiration, nothing less.

  The barmaid seemed to regard him more favourably. ‘Mustard?’ she asked musically, pushing a mustard-pot towards him.

  ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ said Mr. Darby and he helped himself and, lifting the lids of his sandwiches, spread the beef and ham liberally with mustard. He was pleased to see how well the meat was cut: no gristle and not too much fat. ‘Nothing so good as a good sandwich,’ he ventured affably, ‘and nothing so bad as a bad one. Coldish, isn’t it!’

  The barmaid smiled amiably. ‘Yes, but what can you expect?’

  ‘Exactly!’ said Mr. Darby. ‘Exactly! What can we expect? After all we shall have Christmas on us in a month.’

  He said he would take another ham sandwich, ‘just to make up the half half-dozen,’ he added jocularly.

  When he had finished it he felt he could have done with another, but he refrained, for, he told himself, he was one of those men who knew when to stop. With a sigh of satisfaction he finished his second Bass. ‘Really quite a pleasant young person,’ he thought to himself, as he issued from the porch of The Schooner, careless of detection now, on to the Quayside.

  He glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes past one. There were still twenty-five minutes before he need be back at the office, so he turned and walked in the other direction up the Quayside, then crossed the roadway and stood at the edge of the quay to watch a cargo-boat loading. A steam-crane on a trolly, with a frantic hissing and rattling, lifted a great trayful of bales from the quay. The rattling stopped and the jib of the crane and the little cabin from which it protruded twirled ro
und on its trolly, swung the load with it, and poised it over the open hatchway on the ship’s deck. Another pause: then with a sudden outbreak of rattling, it dropped the load neatly into the hold.

  ‘Where is she bound for?’ Mr. Darby asked a man in a navy blue jersey.

  ‘Rotterdam,’ said the sailor.

  ‘A strange, outlandish name,’ Mr. Darby thought to himself as he moved on. Rotterdam! Marseilles! Port Said! The Isthmus of Panama! The South Sea Islands! What a lot of strange foreign places there were in the world. Once more the old hunger for travel and adventure came over him, a hunger so intense that his heart ached at the thought that he would never be able to satisfy it. ‘To think,’ he said, ‘that I shall die, that I shall certainly die, without ever having seen the Jungle.’ There lay the Jungle—somewhere or other in Africa, was it?—it really existed, it was not a mere fairytale fancy, but an absolute, undeniable reality; and here was he, William James Darby, on the Quayside at Newchester-on-Dole, and never, by any possibility, would he see the Jungle, nor any of the other wonders of the world, for that matter. There was Vesuvius, for instance, probably belching out clouds of smoke at this very moment, and he not there to see it. The thought was intolerable. When he was younger he had always taken it for granted that some day he would see everything, experience every adventure that life can offer, and tacitly, almost unconsciously, without making the smallest effort to bring it about, he had gone on believing it. It was this, really, which had kept him going: all his hopes, all his energies, had been blindly directed by this faith. It was only quite recently that he had begun sometimes to suspect that his faith was built upon sand, and it was only to-day, only now, that he had definitely faced the fact that the world, the real world, was beyond his reach, that he was middleaged and tied by the leg to Sarah and the office. It was all very well to think of taking the plunge, as he had done while standing yesterday evening in the doorway of Thirty Seven Ranger Street and surveying the world, but actually it would be impossible to do so. For if he did so his salary would stop: there would be nothing except Uncle Tom Darby’s hundred pounds which might cease at any time, for he must be a great age now; and he couldn’t clear out and leave Sarah penniless or almost penniless. Nor—he might as well admit it—could he himself get on without money. It was all very well to dream about signing-on or going as a stowaway. …

  The thought of ships recalled him to his surroundings. A ship, another cargo-boat, towered above the quay a few yards from him. His eye travelled up and down the masts, among the rigging, along the encumbered deck. Now honestly, could he see himself swarming up those masts, clinging like a spider among that tangle of rigging, running along those slippery decks? Or—he approached the ship more closely and gazed into an open hatch—or (even supposing he could get on board unnoticed, and drop himself neatly, as he had seen the crane drop that cargo just now down that dark hatchway) could he really face the stowaway method of travel? No. Mr. Darby, standing on the Quayside, solemnly assured himself of all these things, and his mind, the reasoning part of him, accepted them, admitted their truth. And yet—strange, inexplicable fact—these melancholy convictions made no difference whatever to his feelings. The depression, the despair that they ought to have produced, did not supervene. Mr. Darby still felt, as he had felt on leaving The Schooner, remarkably jolly. Was it that the heart cannot in a moment shake off a habit of forty years or so? Or was it simply that the Bass,—or, to be accurate, the Basses—and those excellent sandwiches had fortified Mr. Darby against the assaults of cold logic? It is probably truer, as it is certainly more in keeping with his character, to assume that it was a childlike faith—that purest form of faith which burns the more brightly when assailed by irrefutable logic—that kept Mr. Darby’s spirits up in this remarkable fashion. And, after all, if faith can move mountains, it might very well be that if Mr. Darby never got to Vesuvius, Vesuvius would come to him.

  Whatever the reason, Mr. Darby preserved his old enthusiasms. He gave a last look to the shipping, to the troubled steel-bright water seen between the hulls, to the white gulls wheeling stormily in the narrow trough of the valley between water and clouds; he took a long breath of sharp, watery, tarry, smoky air, and then turned inland, for it was half past one. Correct, bland, with features alert yet composed, he climbed the precipitous slope of Cliff Street, and no one could have suspected that the inner Mr. Darby was trolling with head thrown back and a fine, operatic abandon, a song that had been familiar in his youth:

  For I’m going far away

  At the breaking of the day.

  The statement was obviously untrue, but the inner Mr. Darby sang it with a whole-hearted conviction, and the outer Mr. Darby listened, approved, and indeed threw himself into the performance so zealously that his throat contracted and expanded in muscular sympathy, his lips twitched, and, to his surprise and concern, a rudimentary and quickly stifled sound escaped his lips during the closing verse.

  Chapter IV

  Mr. Darby’s Conversion

  But the Basses had not really cured him. Disillusion returned. Days passed, and a week, and another week, but Mr. Darby did not regain his old innocent composure. Those three experiences, his birthday party, the disillusionment of the following morning, and the visit to the Quayside and The Schooner, experiences which to a less sensitive man might have seemed the merest commonplace, had changed him radically. He returned to them again and again in thought, vibrating again to the keen and complex emotions connected with each. It was as if three doors had been mysteriously flung open and he had been permitted to move for a few brief moments in realms of life hitherto unvisited.

  When he had regained his normal bodily state he had found that he could remember much more of the party than in those sick and clouded hours of the morning after. He was now able to enjoy in retrospect the rich solemnity of the occasion and to thrill once more to that sense of power and untrammelled self-expression which had filled him as he stood before the seated multitude and swayed them at his word. It was a stirring memory; for Mr. Darby had the soul of a poet, and memory, to a poet, takes its forms and colours not from the mundane and petty details of the actual event but from the emotions that made it what it was. And so in memory Mr. Darby swayed a multitude and not merely the four familiar friends and the somewhat sceptical wife who had, in fact, been the only persons present. Then, hard upon the release, the expansion, the fulfilment of that initial experience, had come its negative counterpart, the labours and tribulations of the night and early morning, and the cold, clear-eyed disillusionment of the forenoon. In the walk from Number Seven Moseley Terrace to Number Thirty Seven Ranger Street Mr. Darby had done a very dangerous thing; he had turned upon his life a mercilessly analytic scrutiny which had revealed its hollowness. The voyage which during that brain-sick night he had deduced from the oceanic heavings of his bed had been as real as—nay, much more real than—any voyage taken on a tangible liner, for it had been a voyage that bore him away for ever from the old innocent Darby, Darby the child, and landed him in a remote new world, the world of Darby the man, the grim realist for whom the colourful trappings of dream and fancy (those trappings which had made life bearable to him hitherto) were only too lamentably threadbare. But then—as if to save the man from bankruptcy and despair—kind Providence had interposed and, employing (as Providence so often does) a humble agent, had suggested, through the mouth of the clerk McNab, a Bass; and in his search for the Bass Mr. Darby had been drawn to the Quayside and to The Schooner.

  And how deeply moving and how restorative that visit had been. For though it had not dimmed the keenness of his new analytic vision, it had, none the less, given back to life the old warmth and the old wonder, and it had taught Mr. Darby the miraculous truth that hope and happiness may subsist without visible means of support, that a man may face facts and yet not turn his back on romance. But it had suggested to him, too, a doubt that mere unexpressed longing for the life of adventure was enough to conjure it up into reality. If a man
really wants to travel and see the wonders of the world he must, perhaps, do something about it.

  Mr. Darby had, of course, often thought of doing something about it. We saw him, only yesterday evening, standing in the doorway of Number Thirty Seven Ranger Street and actually contemplating the plunge. But the truth was, and had always been, that even while contemplating it and urging himself to take it, Mr. Darby was not in earnest. He knew, even in the very act of urging himself, that he had not really the smallest intention of plunging. He was playing with himself and he was playing with fate.

  But the new Darby, Darby the man, had reached a degree of maturity at which this make-believe had ceased to soothe. In fact, it depressed him, for he felt it now to be a sign and symptom of his ineffectuality. Yes, if he desired adventure, he realised now, he must run to meet it and not simply sit waiting for it to come to him. But what could he do? For in his new and practical mood he saw that there was no meaning in his old dream of taking the plunge. In older and simpler days it was different: then you could, no doubt, step straight off your own back door step, without premeditation or preparation, into the great world. But in these complicated times a man—or anyhow a middle-aged man uninured to hardship and violent muscular effort—needs, as he had come to realize during his meditation on the Quayside, some sort of material backing. The most modest plunge, at least of the kind that he, at his age, was capable of taking, would involve—it was useless to blink the absurd, ugly fact—the purchase of a ticket, and a ticket to any of the places of his dreams—the Sphinx, the Jungle, Vesuvius and so on—would be expensive. Besides, there was Sarah.