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

by Martin Armstrong

  ‘Oh, it’s beautiful enough, I grant you,’ Sarah replied, ‘especially from here. Distance lends enchantment, Jim. And the flowers, I must say I never saw anything like them. I used to make my women in Aba Taana go out and get me different kinds of orchids, and you never saw such a show as they sometimes brought in. I wish I could have taken a few plants home; they’d have looked well in pots in the dining-room. The Savershills’ conservatories can’t touch them; not even the conservatories at Blanchford.’ She gave one of her grim chuckles. ‘From housemaid at Blanchford to Queen of Tongal,—a bit of a jump, isn’t it, Jim, when you come to think of it?’

  ‘Oh, no doubt! No doubt!’ Mr. Darby replied, hastily dismissing the idea.

  And now the Peninsula, slowly, imperceptibly shifting and changing along its length under the influence of the yacht’s progress, began to disclose the belt of desert that bisected it.

  ‘Look, Sarah,’ said Mr. Darby, ‘there’s our frontier,—my northern and your southern frontier. I wish I had my telescope: with it one might even catch sight of an Ompà or two. A horrible place, that desert! I crossed it three times, Sarah. Did you visit it at all?’

  ‘No, your folk didn’t give us the chance,’ Sarah replied, ‘and I’m glad, now, they didn’t. We were just trying to arrange about moving south and searching Mandras when your folk raided us. Now what possessed you, Jim, to let them do that?’

  Mr. Darby coloured slightly. ‘It was what I should call a slip, Sarah, a trifling … ah … misinterpretation.’

  ‘H’m!’ said Sarah laconically. ‘Trifling, was it? I suppose you didn’t happen to see, as I did, the forty-nine corpses that were the result of it? Ten of our people and thirty-nine Mandrats!’

  Mr. Darby opened his eyes. ‘Did you see them, Sarah?’

  Sarah shuddered. ‘Yes, I did, Jim. Forty-nine splendid men, poor silly quarrelsome creatures. We rushed down there as soon as we heard what was up. We couldn’t afford to let things slide: we might have woken up to find ourselves murdered. And it was just as well we did what we did. When we arrived, the Tongali were on the point of marching into Mandras in one great crowd, and in broad daylight if you please. And the job I had to stop them! You’d have thought we were trying to cancel a school-treat instead of trying to save the lives of a good half of them.’

  ‘But you didn’t succeed, Sarah,’ said Mr. Darby and there was a trace of gratification in his voice at Sarah’s powerlessness. ‘They attacked us all the same.’

  ‘Oh we weren’t trying to stop them attacking you,’ said Sarah. ‘That would have been mere madness. The Mandrats would only have attacked us again at some point where we weren’t ready for them and murdered every man, woman, and child of us, and got most of themselves killed into the bargain. What we were after was to get our people to set about things in a businesslike manner. The doctor and I worked it out between us with our maps. The thing was, of course, to attack the Mandrats on all sides at once, to round them up, in fact. You didn’t need to be a Field Marshal to see that. These folk are as brave as tigers and as senseless as babies, so we did what we could to put some sense into them. We sent small parties along both coasts, telling them to travel by night and hide by day. It was a nasty business, Jim; but as it was bound to be a matter of wholesale murder in any case, it seemed the safest thing to do. Of course I gave them the strictest orders that if they found any white men they were to be brought to me, safe and sound.’ Sarah sighed deeply. ‘Well, it worked, you see. But I must say I had my doubts. Short of going with them yourself you couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t lose their heads. However that’s all over now, thank Heaven. It was a ghastly time and no mistake. Not a wink of sleep did I get till they brought you into my house looking like a poor sick poll-parrot and we got you safely to bed on this yacht. I’d never have recognised you, nor Punnett either, Jim, if it hadn’t been for your spectacles. You were like a couple of chimpanzees: you can’t have shaved for days.’

  ‘Ah … no!’ said Mr. Darby. ‘In point of fact, we … ah … hadn’t.’

  He fell into a reverie. It was no good. Sarah was Sarah and there was no good struggling against fate. For once, in that brief reverie, he saw himself through the cold, steel-grey spectacles of reality, a poor feather-bedizened puppet in the clutches of his terrifying, bronze-skinned subjects, a puppet torn from his throne and captured without protest by the Machiavellian strategy of the warlike and masterful Queen of Tongal. But the horribly veracious vision faded and Mr. Darby did not attempt to detain it. He alone had seen it and he alone promptly dismissed it, forgot it so utterly that the facts it so undeniably revealed faded for ever from existence, leaving the ex-King to cherish his kingly memories. Already those memories were assuming their proper tinge of romance. Even Mandras itself, the outward and visible Mandras which swam slowly past his brooding gaze, began to arouse in him those affectionate and proprietary regrets with which exiled sovereigns regard their lost dominions. With time and perhaps a little more firmness he might have made the Mandrats into an industrious and civilized nation: he and Sarah might even have united the two Kingdoms in a single beneficent and Arcadian tyranny and invited their friends to court. But these things were not to be, and perhaps on the whole it was as well. England, though less spectacular, was undeniably more comfortable. He stirred in his chair, sensible of an inward pang: a delicious smell of cooking had drifted from some open hatchway. ‘Isn’t it about … ah … lunch-time, Sarah?’ he asked.

  Sarah glanced at her watch. ‘Only ten minutes now, Jim,’ she said. ‘I can see you’re getting your appetite back.’

  • • • • • • • •

  Towards four o’clock that afternoon they began to round the extreme point of the Peninsula and the Sampoto estuary slowly opened to view. Mr. Darby borrowed the captain’s telescope. It was a more manageable one than his own and he used it more discreetly, an immediate return to the Peninsula being foreign to his plans. Blue, silver, rose, and a great stream of green swam past his vision. Then, after some trouble, he got what he sought.

  There, before his single, absorbed, incredulous eye, lay the little bay exactly as it had first appeared to him. It seemed to him, as he stared at it now, that he had lived in it for years, so intensely familiar was every shrub, every rock and stone. There, as if they had just left it, was the hut of leaves and branches Punnett had built for them to sleep in. There was still a great heap of dry fuel outside it, ready for the nightly bonfire whose smoke kept off the piums and mosquitoes.

  ‘Extraordinary! Extraordinary!’ he muttered to Sarah who stood at his side. ‘You must look at it, Sarah. There’s the very bonfire. Extraordinary!’ He continued his exclamations, exhorting Sarah to look, but too absorbed to realize that he himself retained the telescope. ‘And there’s where I paddled. And there’s the arbour Punnett made for me. And … and … good Heavens! My …! But …!’ Mr. Darby nearly dropped the telescope overboard again.

  ‘What is it, Jim?’ asked Sarah, steadying him with a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘It’s Punnett!’ said Mr. Darby in a shaken whisper. ‘Poor Punnett’s suit, just where he hung it out to dry. I thought at first …!’ He continued to stare absorbedly down the telescope at the poor shape that faced his eye, the very shape, the very lines, the sad, deprecating attitude of Punnett himself; the arms drooping limply from the sides as if with a last modest appeal to his master who was leaving the place for ever and leaving him to rot in his solitary grave in Tongal a thousand miles from the nearest white man. ‘Take it, Sarah! Take it!’ sobbed Mr. Darby, dropping the telescope into her hands.

  By sunset the Mandratic Peninsula was no more than a thin blue finger with a swollen knuckle-bone, jutting into a lake of pale and limpid gold. A week later they steamed into Sydney harbour.

  Chapter XXXVIII

  A Royal Pardon

  A week later they steamed into Sydney harbour and a fortnight after that they steamed out of it again, for both Mr. Darby and Sarah were in a hurry to get home. Th
ey travelled by P. &. O., which sails direct and avoids the curious detour northwards taken by the Scarlet Funnel Line. Besides, Mr. Darby had formed the opinion that the Scarlet Funnel ships were unsafe, not only because of the strange habits of the passengers who travelled on them but also because in them, as he himself had proved, it was possible to fall overboard in perfectly calm weather. The passengers on this P. & O. liner were as well-behaved as it is possible for passengers to be, and in any case, with Sarah at hand, Mr. Darby was safe enough from the female half.

  Providence, hearing that Mr. Darby had extended a free pardon to England, paved the way of return with fair winds and calm seas. The typhoon that, on the voyage out, had dogged him in the China Sea was ordered to its kennel; the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea were carefully cooled for the occasion. At Aden the ghosts of that ill-matched pair, Lady Gissingham and Mrs. Gudgeon, wished him a prosperous voyage; in the Red Sea the sea-logged corpse of Gudgeon stirred in its fishy grave but sent no disturbing sign to the surface; at Port Said the phantom of Sir Alistair Gissingham cut him dead from a ghostly tender and ghosts of the two young Rentons waved to him and smiled a little superciliously; and throughout the voyage the pleasant, lazy, cynical shadow of Mr. Amberley amused him with inaudible conversation which was more easily understood than much of the audible kind had been.

  Where were all those people now? Mr. Darby longed to know. It was sad that they should have vanished so utterly from his life. The first-class passengers on this P. & O. boat were pale and indistinguishable phantoms compared with the vivid reality of those others that still haunted his thoughts. No doubt they had all returned soberly to their unknown homes in England, all except Lady Gissingham. Her it was impossible to imagine peacefully at home. She, strange, frustrated creature, would be wandering the world, seeking in vain for something never to be found. Perhaps she was on board that outward-bound Orient liner they had seen yesterday in Port Said.

  After Port Said Mr. Darby felt himself virtually at home already. The Mediterranean to his far-travelled mind was little more than a safe and attractive pleasure-water upon whose tranquil breast one could sit and enjoy, care-free, a cigar and a John Collins. He had already regained all his old plumpness, all his old bland importance. Not that he had forgotten his Kingdom: it was often in his thoughts and, much more often than he could have wished, in his dreams. More than once, in the middle of some hideous nocturnal function in which everything seemed to be going irrecoverably wrong, he would be recalled to safety and reality by a vigorous shake and Sarah’s reassuring rebuke: ‘For goodness sake wake up, Jim, or you’ll rouse the whole ship.’

  ‘I … I dreamt I was back in Mandras,’ he would babble sleepily.

  ‘You and your Mandras,’ Sarah would grumble. ‘It seems to me you took the place too seriously. Suppose I was to start screaming about Tongal. We should get locked up as a couple of lunatics, and serve us right. Now off you go to sleep again; but mind, keep clear of Mandras.’

  Sarah, too, was enjoying the voyage, she was enjoying even the idleness of it. After all she had been through, it was bliss to sit in a deck-chair and talk to Jim, or to watch him, with a cigar in his mouth, his spectacles reflecting the blue serenity of the sea, puffing importantly up and down the deck like a small, compact steam-engine. She confessed to herself now that there had been periods when she had abandoned hope, given Jim up for lost, though at the time she had resolutely refused to admit it. At such moments her determined search in that strange, almost impenetrable country full of barbarous lunatics seemed nothing more than a wilful self-torturing madness destined to end in heart-breaking disappointment. For surely, even if Jim and Punnett had got to shore, a thing that had seemed almost impossible to the captain of the Utopia and completely impossible to herself when, after weeks of travel, she coasted the peninsula on a stormy evening, surely the two lonely, unarmed creatures would infallibly have been murdered by those excitable hot-headed savages that seemed to her at first sight much more like wild animals than human beings. And yet, after all those days and nights of hideous misgiving, of absolute but unconfessed despair, here they were together again on this comfortable, homely liner, a floating fragment of England. Yes, she was content—far more than content; she was blissfully happy—to sit utterly idle and feast herself on Jim’s mere presence. It seemed to her, in this blessed reaction, that she was cured of all her old desires and antipathies. She had no idea what Jim’s wishes were, what schemes he had for their new life in England. Only one thing was certain: he was permanently cured of the Jungle: there would be no more talk of adventure and exploration. Concerning the various probabilities she was indifferent. If Jim wanted to live in London, they would live in London. If he had some mad scheme for building a great house somewhere in the country, well, he could build it and she would run it for him. Without a murmur she would engage and govern a regiment of servants; she would refrain from making beds and sweeping floors; she would even abandon her job on the H.C.S. Meanwhile there was over a week more of this restful interlude, for by mutual consent they were not leaving the ship at Marseilles, as most of the first-class passengers were doing, but continuing the voyage, more slowly but more restfully, to Tilbury.

  • • • • • • • •

  It was not till after Marseilles that Mr. Darby broached the subject of a home.

  ‘I’m rather sorry now, Sarah, I didn’t keep on the house in Bedford Square. It would have been what I should call a peeder-tare, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘But I don’t, Jim!’ said Sarah. ‘Never heard of the thing! You mean you wish you had it to go back to?’

  ‘Well … ah … temporariously,’ said Mr. Darby, ‘while we looked out for some suitable … ah … mansion.’

  Sarah nodded. ‘Then you’re thinking of a house in London?’

  Mr. Darby pursed his lips judicially. ‘I may have to spend a part of the year, for business reasons, in and about the Metropolis.’

  ‘Quite so!’ said Sarah. ‘And what is the business to be, Jim?’

  Mr. Darby affected a certain nonchalance. ‘Oh … ah … well … ah … lecturing and so on. And no doubt they’ll expect me to become a member of the Travellers’ Club.’ He remained for some moments lost in thought. ‘It was a thousand pities,’ he then said, ‘that poor Punnett left the camera on the Utopia. Some photos of Mandras …!’

  ‘It seems to me, Jim,’ Sarah interrupted, ‘that you remember quite enough of Mandras without having any photos to lead you on.’

  ‘I was thinking at the moment,’ said Mr. Darby, ‘of … ah … slides.’

  ‘Slides, Jim?’

  ‘Ah … yes! Lantern slides for the purposes of … ah … lecturing!’

  ‘So you’re going to lecture about your adventures?’

  ‘Well, no doubt I shall be expected to, and if they really insist I don’t see that one can very well refuse, do you?’

  ‘Well, I could, Jim; but I don’t see why you should refuse if you don’t want to. I fancy you’d enjoy it.’

  ‘Oh, enjoyment!’ Mr. Darby made a gesture of intolerance. ‘I should regard it as a duty, Sarah.’

  ‘A duty, Jim? A duty to whom?’

  ‘Oh … well … ah … to the public, to be shaw! To sosarty in general!’ His tone changed: it became gentle, appealing. ‘You wouldn’t mind now, would you, Sarah, spending part of our time in London?’

  Mr. Darby’s now contained volumes. It alluded discreetly to their original separation; it hinted at the immense changes wrought in each of them by their wonderful and appalling adventures; it stressed, with a tinge of something not far from humility, the impossibility of anything like disagreement between them in their present happy state of reunion. It was, indeed, a word, as Mr. Darby had used it, of such potency, such complex allusiveness, that it provided the happiest auguries for his success as a lecturer.

  Sarah felt its force and at once reacted to it. ‘I’ll live wherever you like, Jim,’ she replied heartily, ‘short of going back to the M
andratic Peninsula.’

  Mr. Darby’s spectacles flooded her with sunshine. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we might put up at the Balmoral and look about us;—Belgravia, Mayfair, and so on.’

  But when they had passed Gibraltar (‘One of our national bulwarks, Sarah!’) and the Bay was already safely behind them; when they had steamed up the Channel and entered the mouth of the Thames, the Thames that was so unmistakably England—England in the small smoke-grimed huddled houses on its shores, England in its dreary mud-flats, England in the very quality and touch of its draughty air; Mr. Darby’s immediate schemes for Mayfair and Belgravia suddenly and surprisingly collapsed.

  ‘Sarah,’ he said to his wife who leaned beside him on the rail, ‘first of all we must go home.’

  Sarah’s heart leapt. ‘What, to Number Seven, Jim?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr. Darby, ‘to Number Seven.’

  • • • • • • • •

  They did not disembark till close on noon and it was two o’clock when the boat-train steamed into St. Pancras. The moment was a solemn one. Throughout the journey from Tilbury Mr. Darby had not spoken a word: it was no time for talk even of the most serious description. Not that there were any doubts in his mind about the completeness of London’s pardon. He was not one to hold back or make reservations on such an occasion: his was an open and unclouded nature. His silence was due solely to the depth of his feelings and his proper sense of the gravity and of the historical quality of the occasion; and the privileged onlookers who, when the train drew up in the station, noted the exuberance with which he sprang from the train to the platform, can have had little doubt of the cordiality and thoroughness of his forgiveness, as, with no false bashfulness, he took London to his heart. And with a proper gratitude, a proper humility, London responded. The busy crowds that climbed Ludgate Hill noticed a becoming pinkness suffuse the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral; the Cabinet Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Permanent Under-secretaries, M.P.’s and Civil Servants who happened at the moment to be crossing Parliament Square or hurrying south-westward along Parliament Street detected an unusually passionate quality in the tone of Big Ben; the buses as they plied their whirling dance round Trafalgar Square found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly (for the afternoon was overcast) inundated in sunshine; and members of the Stock Exchange stood open-mouthed at an exultant leap in prices unprecedented in the history of finance.