Murder in Pastiche

by Marion Mainwaring

  “Capt.—see.”

  Was the Florabunda herself engaged in some Gargantuan plot, fantastic in its sheer gaucherie?—for if the conventional apparatus of espionage is trite, still it is gauche to ignore the conventions. Could one trust the Captain? Nappleby had seen a fanatic gleam in his eyes. For that matter, could one trust Mr. Waggish himself?

  With a sense of physical relief, gulping fresh air in after near-asphyxiation, Nappleby decided that here at least lay solid ground. The First Officer was no spy. His indignation was genuine; it carried, moreover, an overtone of unselfconscious boyish excitement which no conspirator could simulate, nor, indeed, have the refinement of imagination to desire.

  Mr. Waggish stood waiting now for the pearls of wisdom which an Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard must drop. In fact the First Officer’s faith, Nappleby acknowledged with a sigh, put upon one a heavy responsibility. He asked his next question rather abstractedly: “Does the name Thomas Gray suggest anything to you?”

  “Aye!” Mr. Waggish spoke promptly and apparently without being disconcerted by the tangential character of the inquiry. “I know some of his poetry. ‘When you see three lights ahead, Right rudder, and show your red.’ And then there is ‘Green to green or red to red, Perfect safety, go ahead!’”

  “Thomas Gray?”

  “Gray.”

  “Not the same man, I fancy.”

  Mr. Waggish shrugged. “He is in Standard Seamanship—it’s a very fine book. You’ll know his ‘General Caution”?

  “Both in safety and in doubt,

  Always keep a good look-out.

  In danger, with no room to turn,

  Ease her—stop her—go astern!”

  “Your Gray sounds a practical man.” They had come to a bulkhead door leading in from deck; Nappleby paused. “The ‘good look-out’ is admirably to the point. We are certainly in doubt. But are we in danger? And if so, exactly how?”

  The ship’s Doctor joined them as they entered the cabin which was being used as headquarters.

  “You are a poet, Doctor. Do you know Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality’?” Nappleby was still nagged by Wordsworth. Of course there was always, he thought, Spy Nosy.…

  The Doctor’s face brightened. He took his pipe from his mouth and brandished it like a chunky baton. “I once wrote an ode. To a tanker I sailed on once. In thirty-five stanzas it was, Pindaric, very beautiful! That was before I became interested in the heroic poem—

  “Descend, Heroic Muse! Forsake Parnassus’ hilly height

  For that sad plain where languishes Tipptop in sorry plight:

  Noble Tipptop, the valiantest—

  Do you know, Sir Jon., how many lines I have written so far? Fifty-seven thousand! And it is not yet complete. You might like to hear part of it? Waggish has heard a bit, last night.”

  “Aye, it’s fine stuff.” The First Officer stooped to pick up an envelope that lay on deck just inside the cabin door.

  The Doctor waved his pipe, eyes closed, in time to some delicious rhythm which beguiled his inner ear. “You must listen to it, Sir Jon. We had an Oxford don aboard, three trips back, who heard the Invocation, and part of the first canto, and the descent to the underworld, and he was tremendously moved.” The Doctor’s pudgy face quivered in all its parts with emotion recollected. “He said the only English poet whom he could think of who gave a comparable experience was Sir Richard Blackmore!

  “To see the Gods come down to earth and mortal men accost,

  To see their spears hurled fore and aft, their faerie lances tossed,

  I rate my life a gudgeon’s worth, and count the World Well Lost!”

  Mr. Waggish had pulled something from his envelope. He gave a low cry. “Gosh—look at this!”

  Nappleby took the green slip be extended. “Fifteen thousand dollars drawn on the Bank of New York and Washington, payable to Paul Price—signed by Homer T. Anderson.”

  “Fifteen thousand dollars! That’s—” The First Officer broke off, round-eyed.

  “Quite so. It is more than five thousand pounds. It is also, I fancy, what Price meant when he jotted ‘15 gr?’ on that paper. A grand is a thousand. We can remove the interrogation point. Mr. Anderson was apparently willing to pay up.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “It suggests itself. But for what?” Nappleby sat down, puzzled.

  “Who put the check in here?” The Doctor displayed an unanticipated capacity for coming to the point.

  “Anyone could have pushed it under the door, I suppose.” The First Officer spoke thoughtfully. “But who would have done so except the killer? Will there be fingerprints, Sir Jon.?”

  “Yours and mine, now. The person who put it here will have had the brain to remove his own. The envelope could have come from any writing-desk on the ship.”

  “At least, it wouldn’t have been Anderson who called it to our attention this way.”

  “Anderson! There’s a strange man.” The Doctor jabbed the air sager with his pipe. “I took him a seasickness pill the first day out; he must not have heard me knock, for when I went in he was on his hands and knees, and ye’ll never guess what he was doing.” The pipe hung poised between disgust and ridicule. “He was playing with a doll! He thrust it out of sight, but not before I’d seen it.”

  “If he’s dotty, that simplifies things.” Mr. Waggish was rather relieved than otherwise by this evidence of abnormality. “Shall I send and have him put into the brig?”

  The Doctor’s eyes flashed in approbation:

  “‘Away with him,’ cried Sarazin, ‘Away to dungeon deep,

  With toads and rats to languish there, nor may he hope to sleep!’”

  Nappleby waited patiently for the last iamb to wend its limping way. “Not yet. I shall follow Mr. Price’s schedule. ‘Florabunda. Capt—see.’”

  The two officers exchanged a look of dubiety.

  “Could someone do an errand for you?” The First Officer rubbed his chin.

  “I had really better go myself.” Nappleby was mystified. “I know it is not customary … but surely under the circumstances—”

  Mr. Waggish screwed up his tanned face: unscrewed it after some tortuous ratiocinative process. He fixed a faintly hopeful blue eye on Nappleby. “Were you by any chance in the Navy during the War, Sir Jon.?”

  “I am afraid not. No. Why?”

  “It might have helped. We had better say that you were in the Navy. Or—no.” The First Officer sighed. “Perhaps not. Mind you, he may be quite okay today.”

  “But—”

  “It’s a little awkward to explain.” The First Officer led the way from the cabin as he spoke. “You understand, I have no prejudice against landsmen. Some of my best friends live ashore. But the Old Man—well, he’s a purist, if you take my meaning. If you’ll just bear that in mind … He’s dotty, of course.”

  “Ah.” Nappleby weighed this information. “The Doctor is more broad-minded?”

  “Oh, aye.”

  “And more—balanced?

  “Yes, he’s a very fine chap. To be sure, you might call his poetry an obsession. Not that it doesn’t have some very noble thoughts in it. ‘To see the Gods descend to earth, di dum di dum di dum, I’d rate my life a something something, and hold the World Well Lost’—very noble!”

  “A bit extreme, perhaps? That is, I gather that at that juncture of the fable his hero is prepared to liquidate his army and himself for the sake of seeing seraphim, or whatever, on the battlefield? Rather like Nero firing Rome for the sake of the spectacle.”

  “Extreme?” Mr. Waggish’s repetition of this verdict was uncertain. His face cleared as he apprehended what he took to be the root of the criticism: “Oh, of course there’s no such thing really as gods and fairies and all that. But what I was driving at—the thoughts may be noble; but as to the—ah, the literary merit …” Poised at the top of the companion, he turned a keen eye on Nappleby. “What would you say, now, of this Sir Richard Blackmore he
mentioned? Was he a celebrated writer?”

  Nappleby phrased his reply meticulously. “To call him merely obscure would be, I fear, to glorify him unduly. He was, in fact, one of the worst writers in the language. But voluminous. Oh, very voluminous.”

  The First Officer nodded as at verification of a cherished but doleful hypothesis. “Now if you’ll just wait, Sir Jon., I’ll tell the Old Man you are here.”

    

  Perched high on the Florabunda, the Captain’s quarters nevertheless suggested a cave—arched above, and gloomy in the pallid light of the foggy afternoon. An Homeric cavern, deep-sunken in the sea—but a sea neither wine-dark nor wine-heady, but perversely dull, throwing up a surly screen of grey.

  A light snapped on, dispelling Nappleby’s speluncar revery. His sight of the Captain chased out Homer with an heroic charge of iambics: With many a tempest had his beard been shaken.… Here (and this was in gratifying contrast to the Wordsworthian echoes still remotely troubling Nappleby) the process of association was copiously clear. But also—it was chastening to acknowledge—banal: the merest undergraduate would have found himself repeating the same line on beholding the Captain.

  Yet the association was not wholly impractical. Chaucer’s peregrinating Shipman had never struck out into the open Atlantic. His ship (His barge ycleped was the Maudelayne)—his Magdalen, which paid customs at Dartmouth in the 1360’s, had not the labyrinthine engine rooms of the Florabunda, nor had she carried burlap sackfuls of advertisements, billets-doux, and copies of the London Times to a region beyond Ultima Thule. Yet the Shipman was the forerunner of this tall, green-eyed, deep-eyed mariner in navy-blue and gold.

  Hardy he was, and wise to undertake.… but he had been, as well, a good bit of a scoundrel. Had the seafaring tradition in this respect changed as drastically as in its views on square rigs and keelhauling? Were the products of Pangbourne, and Kings Point, New York, now officers and gentlemen merely? Or were they still capable of bloody deeds? Had this Captain, in brief, dealt in murder like his mediaeval forebear?

  If he had, Nappleby surmised, it was for more reward than a share in the cargo. Even for more than the pleasure of intrigue. It must be a matter of piracy on the grand scale, to judge from his countenance:

  His beard was long, his face was brown,

  And his eyes were wild.

  But now quotation was degenerating into irresponsibility. Checking further quaint transmogrifications, Nappleby approached the Captain, whose eyes softened till they beamed with the mild graciousness of an autarch granting audience: which was, Nappleby reminded himself, no figure, but a literal denomination of the facts.

  “My First Officer tells me that you’re book-learned.” The Captain beckoned imperiously. “What would you say to this, now? Do you know this book?”

  Nappleby scrutinized the thick quarto which lay open to its title-page on the Captain’s table. “The Anatomy of the Ocean Sea? I fear I am not familiar with it, sir.”

  “Aye. The Anatomy of the Ocean Sea: Its Nature and Tropes with the Severall Parts and the Creatures that Dwell Therein; declaring the Sovereignty of Sea-Men, and the secrets of the true Dominion of the World, with the opinion of Platon thereon fully and truthfully discovered.”

  The Captain placed enormous, orotund stress on every word of the title. Nappleby’s gaze flickered about the cabin: to the bunk, the settee, the charts, the desk—on the desk, partly hidden by the quarto, was the picture of a woman with flowing hair, and near the picture stood a globe on which the seas, rife with arrows, ships, and dolphins, girdled blank and nameless continents.

  “‘… many strange places, waters, seas, straits, havens, channels, isthmuses, canals, and the waters below which fishes, whales, seamonsters, mermaidens, remora, giant barnacles—”’

  The Captain’s finger kept his place on the yellowed page. “This Platon, now—you know his name? He was a Greek, I take it? Aye.… They’re bad sailors, the Greeks. I’ve put into the Piraeus often. Dirty blighters; the vessels foul bottoms all of them. But let that be.… This Platon says, as I take it, that material things are not real. They are only shadows. And the mind should not be fouled up in them.”

  “That is, perhaps, a way of putting one aspect of Plato’s thought.”

  “The mind ought to command the machine?”

  “It would be easier to give an opinion in a specific case.” Nappleby was cautious.

  “Aye. Well, look here.” The Captain patted his beard. His strange eyes wavered. He seemed, suddenly, almost shy. “According to the engineers, my ship will do twenty-one knots, if pressed.”

  “Ah?”

  “It’s a simple matter—on the material plane, that is.” The Captain sighed. “You take your r.p.m., times 60, times the pitch of the propeller, times the slip, all over 6,080, and you get your speed.”

  “I see.”

  “Aye. That gives you your knots. But”—the Captain removed his hand from his beard to thump the table—“if material things are not real, who is to say she can do only twenty-one knots? Why should the Queens do more? or”—the Captain winced— “the United States? Why should not I have the Blue Riband? Why should I be bound by mere illusion—”

  Nappleby thought it best to take a firm stand. “In such a case I should be guided by the engineers. The scientists. There are limits to the power of the will, in the sphere of becoming, at least.”

  “I dare say.” The Captain heaved another melancholy sigh. But as he stared down at his book a wanchancy glint, stubborn and secretive, returned to his eyes.

  “Besides, is speed so important, sir?” Nappleby was soothing. “If one wants to hurry, one can travel”—he took care to voice disdain—“by air.”

  “Air! ’Tis only b——s like that lubber who got his this morning who would travel by air.”

  “Do you know why he was killed?” Nappleby flung the question out abruptly.

  “Of course. He was killed because he insulted the Florabunda.”

  “Ah.” By an acrobatic exercise of the imagination, Nappleby followed the Captain’s logic—for possibly it was logical, granted certain assumptions, to suppose that Price had been punished by some avenging Triton; by the sacred horses of Poseidon, plunging inexorably up out of the waves. “Quite so. But there was a human agent involved. Price was struck on the back of the head.”

  “That may be.” The Captain was courteous but indifferent.

  Nappleby reverted to direct interrogation. “Do you know who that agent was, sir?”

  “No. Ask my First Officer. He said he would investigate. He must know by now.”

  “He is investigating. But it is not easy to find out who, of all the persons involved, snatched three minutes unobserved at that hour of night. It could have been anyone. Everyone moves about so freely.”

  “Ha!” Nappleby had touched another raw sore. “It all comes of catering to passengers. In the old days you kept landlubbers below, in the hold; you battened down the hatches; you kept them out of the way till they could be unloaded. They fed on bread and water. But now! They wamble about from stem to stern. Cinemas! Dancing! Wireless! We even have to carry women. Human women!”

  Nappleby, mildly intrigued by this special view of maritime history, was particularly caught by the concluding epithet, which the Captain mouthed with extraordinary verjuice; it was (Nappleby guessed) a mere tautology like “mortal man” or (more apposite) the Peggotty family’s “drowned dead.” And now, he realized, the Captain had swung back to metaphysics, to voice a private dualism:

  “I'here’s right and there’s wrong. There’s sea and there’s land. You cannot have it both ways.”

  “And Price was a landsman. Yes. Incidentally, it seems that he intended to pay you a visit, sir. Did he do so?”

  “Visit me?” The Captain’s expression rendered further working of the point superfluous.

  “There is the possibility also”—Nappleby was deliberately circuitous—“that his death may be connected with a plot involvi
ng high explosive weapons—”

  The Captain’s face was contorted; his eyes shot flame. “He brought explosives aboard the Florabunda?”

  “No, no. I should say there’s no present peril. And it was not Price who was plotting for their use, but another passenger; Price appears to have found out about it. The object of the attack is apparently Moscow, or possibly New York; the conspirators, if that is what they are, seem to be above taking sides.”

  “Oh—cities.” The Captain shrugged. He sat down, relieved.

  “I don’t suppose any of your officers would be involved in such doings? They are all trustworthy?”

  “They spend their leaves ashore.” The Captain’s beard trembled again, but more in sorrow than in anger. “With human women.” He relapsed into a despondent meditation upon the botchedness of modern civilization which left little scope for the conversational amenities. Nappleby withdrew with a final glance at the charts, the globe, the Anatomy of the Ocean Sea, and the picture. He could now see this last item entire. The face was indeed lovely; and—mulier formosa superne—the torso ended in a finny tail.

    

  The Captain’s whereabouts at the time of Price’s death ought perhaps to be ascertained. But the Captain was innocent of trifling with atomic warfare. If he had no love for the kingdoms of the earth, he would rely for their destruction on the powers of Neptune. He would simply await another Deluge.

  Nor was Anderson himself dealing in total annihilation. Nappleby laughed as he swung down the lurching companion. The interlude above, lubricating his mind, had shown him how to fit Anderson into place. And the significance of Wordsworth’s “Ode.”

  But Anderson might still, of course, be the murderer.

    