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

by Martin Armstrong

  After dinner Mr. Darby betook himself to the smoking-room. Several men were already seated there. The red-faced brutal man was sunk in a deep chair in the very centre of the room, an immense cigar was stuck, like a peg, into the middle of his face. Mr. Darby, shying away from him, found himself facing the quiet, humorous man who had sat alone in the dining-saloon. The chair next to his was vacant, and Mr. Darby, indicating it with an open palm, asked with a polite cock-robin bow: ‘May I … ah …?’

  ‘Pray do!’ said the quiet man with a pleasant, dry smile.

  Mr. Darby seated himself and took out his cigar-case. He opened it, gravely contemplated the contents and then handed it to his neighbour. ‘Do you … ah …?’

  The quiet man glanced at the cigars, hesitated, and said: ‘You’re very kind, sir. Are they fairly mild?’

  ‘Oh, quite! Quite!’ said Mr. Darby. ‘I can’t smoke strong ones.’

  The quiet man took one and Mr. Darby selected one for himself, inspected it doubtfully, rolled it between finger and thumb, listening to it like a robin listening for a worm in a lawn, and decided that it was good. When both cigars were alight the quiet man asked Mr. Darby if he was going far.

  ‘All the way, sir!’ said Mr. Darby. ‘In point of fact, to Sydney.’

  ‘I too am going to Sydney,’ said the other.

  Mr. Darby bowed. ‘I’m glad, very glad, that I shall have the … ah … pleasure …! My name, sir, is Darby,—William James Darby!’

  ‘And mine,’ said the quiet man, ‘ is Wilfrid Amberley.’

  ‘Yes,’ pursued Mr. Darby, ‘business calls me to Sydney.’

  Mr. Amberley smiled. ‘I fear I have no excuse.’

  Mr. Darby nodded. ‘To be shaw! Merely pleasure, I presume.’

  ‘Curiosity, rather; pursuit of experience. Whatever it is, it applies to the voyage and not to the destination. As soon as I get to Sydney I shall leave it.’

  ‘You don’t like Sydney, then?’

  ‘No. I’ve never been there, but it’s a modern town and so I know already that I don’t like it.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather what I should call … ah … sweeping?’ asked Mr. Darby, pursing his lips and putting his head on one side.

  ‘Oh completely!’ said Mr. Amberley. ‘It was meant to be. A modern town is a manifestation of modern life and modern life is disgusting. There, in that chair there, you have another manifestation.’ He pointed at the red-faced brutal man, who sprawled with closed eyes. ‘Do you, Mr. Darby, know who that is?’

  ‘No! Ah, no! I must confess …’ said Mr. Darby.

  ‘That’s Gudgeon, Gudgeon’s Nerve Food.’

  Mr. Darby was thunderstruck. He turned in his chair and inspected the sleeping form with profound interest. ‘Why, bless my soul!’ he said. ‘To be shaw! Fancy that, now! A world-famous name, one might say! A household word!’

  ‘Precisely! Have you tried the Nerve Food?’

  ‘Never!’ replied Mr. Darby. ‘My wife doesn’t approve of patent medicines. But I understand, from what I hear, that it’s wonderful.’

  ‘Wonderful for trade, but quite useless for nerves,’ said Mr. Amberley; ‘except in so far as anything is good for nerves if the nervous one has faith. And that, now that I come to think of it, is our friend’s justification; in fact, it throws a very beautiful light upon him. He doesn’t look, does he, like a great religious teacher? And yet he evokes in countless guileless souls a pure, unadulterated faith. I say unadulterated advisedly, because they cure themselves without the smallest material assistance from the Nerve Food, which, a chemist friend of mine assures me, consists solely of pulverized sawdust, soap, and a little sugar.’

  Mr. Darby was growing accustomed to his friend’s dry humour, and took this statement as an example of it. It had never occurred to him to doubt that all patent medicines were what they professed themselves to be.

  As he was on his way to bed that evening the long corridor idly and slowly stirred itself and the left wall rubbed itself against him like a cat. Mr. Darby was extremely disconcerted. When he had regained his balance, he hurried to his cabin. His cabin heeled gently as though under his weight and the long swish of moving water was heard through the open porthole. These vague denials of stability repeated themselves and Mr. Darby got hastily to bed. There he found them less disagreeable, managed, in fact, by imagining he was being rocked in a cradle, to get a little tentative enjoyment out of them.

  When he awoke next morning, the sea, to his surprise and relief, was calm. He had anticipated a storm.

  After breakfast he stepped out on to the promenade deck. People were walking up and down in twos and threes. He found his friend Mr. Amberley seated alone in a deck-chair. Seeing Mr. Darby he made a gesture offering him the chair next his. Mr. Darby bowed, sat down, and accepted a cigarette.

  ‘A poor return, I’m afraid, for your admirable cigar,’ said Mr. Amberley. ‘I have been watching the animals at play. Our Nerve Feeder and his woman are not pretty movers, are they?’

  Mr. Darby turned his head in time to see the great Gudgeon forge past in a huge open great-coat and grey felt hat, with an enormous cigar stuck in his mouth. He walked as if concentrated on the task of pushing his knees and his stomach in front of him. Mrs. Gudgeon was invisible behind him.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Mr. Amberley reflectively, ‘if that cigar is a sham one: a thin shell of tobacco-leaf stuffed with sawdust.’

  But Mr. Darby’s attention had wandered to the next couple, the hard, handsome lady who had been dressed, last night, in rose-coloured silk and the aristocratic young man with the eyeglass who was rather like the Stedmans’ cat. He was dressed now in a smart double-breasted blue suit and she, too, wore dark blue with white, green and silver at the wrists and throat, and a green straw hat. In the light of day her age was still more evident. It was evident in a hollowness at the temples and the grim droop of the mouth.

  ‘I see,’ said Mr. Amberley’s quiet voice, ‘that the bold bad Baroness has added another to her victims.’

  ‘The Baroness?’

  ‘Yes, the lady you were inspecting with so much admiration just now.’

  ‘She’s a Baroness?’

  ‘She was, till she recently acquired another alias by marrying that young nincompoop Sir Alistair Gissingham. She must be at least double his age. In her previous incarnation she was the notorious Baroness Bluthner. You remember the famous case.’

  ‘Oh … ah … indeed!’ said Mr. Darby, who had never heard of the Baroness or the case. ‘To be shaw now! Very intrigguous! One felt at once she had what I should call a history.’

  ‘I wonder how long she’ll take to train young Gissingham to shoot himself. She got poor Bluthner to score a bull in two years.’

  ‘Very shocking, very shocking indeed!’ said Mr. Darby. ‘Personally I don’t find her … ah … attractive: rather too much of an obelisk for my taste. I chanced to catch her eye last night at dinner and, upon my word, I felt what I should call a shiver go through me.’

  ‘My dear Mr. Darby,’ said Mr. Amberley quietly, ‘you have defined her exactly: not quite the odalisque, not completely the basilisk, but just precisely an obelisk,—an obelisk, like Cleopatra’s Needle, that has lost a good deal of its surface decoration.’

  It was evident to Mr. Darby that Mr. Amberley was something of a character, by which he meant that Mr. Amberley had curious ideas of his own, ideas which caused him, in the middle of a perfectly sensible conversation, to break suddenly into Double Dutch. In this jumble of references to odalisques and basilisks and Cleopatra’s Needle Mr. Darby felt that Mr. Amberley had wandered off into a world of his own. He had not the slightest idea what he was talking about. He was anxious therefore to change the subject; and the fact that, for some undiscoverable reason, Cleopatra’s Needle had instantly suggested to him the Mandratic Peninsula, provided him at once with a smooth transition.

  ‘Speaking of Cleopatra’s Needle,’ he said to the astonished Mr. Amberley, ‘are you at all … ah … what I
should call familiar with … ah … Mandratia?’

  ‘Mandratia?’ said Mr. Amberley. ‘Well, I know something of it, of course, from Harrington’s extraordinary study, and I feel sure I must have bumped up against it in The Golden Bough and Malinowski and so on.’

  ‘I was referring,’ said Mr. Darby, ‘to the place itself.’

  ‘The place itself! Not likely! Why it’s full of savages.’

  ‘Quite!’ said Mr. Darby.

  ‘Are you assuming, Mr. Darby, that because I dislike modern life, I like primitive life? Nothing of the sort. What I like is civilization. It is only because modern life is so horribly uncivilized that I detest it. But I should detest the Man-dratians still more. When I pay a visit, I prefer not to provide the meals.’

  Mr. Darby raised his eyebrows. ‘You refer to some custom … ah … prélevant in Mandratia?’

  Mr. Amberley nodded. ‘Precisely. To that, in fact, of cannibalism.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Mr. Darby, shifting uncomfortably in his chair, ‘that it is dying out.’

  ‘Well,’ Mr. Amberley replied, ‘I think I’ll wait till it has died out. It would be unpleasant to be kept wondering, during one’s visit, whether cannibalism or oneself was going to die out first.’

  Mr. Darby did not like Mr. Amberley’s tone regarding Mandratia, indeed he liked it so little that he decided to drop that subject also, and the easiest way that presented itself at the moment was to remove one of the conversationalists. He rose from his chair. ‘Well … ah … I have one or two … ah …! ‘He smiled at his friend and, leaning back on the breeze, set off down the deck with a little run induced by an unexpected lurch of the ship.

  The movements with which the ship was responding to a smart breeze were not important but they were disconcerting. They defeated one’s intentions, introduced into one’s deportment a certain frivolity. When Mr. Darby began to go downstairs, one of the steps freakishly rose to meet his extended foot. The next one dodged him, so that he spasmodically gripped the banister. In negotiating the corridor he found himself impelled to bump against the left wall, and when he exerted himself to correct this behaviour he instantly tip-toed across the corridor into a cabin that was not his own. The door-handle of his own cabin provided a welcome support, but as he turned it the door swung open, gave him an unexpected tug and sent him trotting up against Punnett. Without the alteration of a feature Punnett put out a hand and steadied him. Already Mr. Darby had discovered that Punnett’s mere presence was extremely reassuring. In manner and appearance he represented permanence, security, imperturbability: his surroundings and the behaviour of his surroundings produced on him, it seemed, no effect whatever. One cut loose, tore oneself from one’s native shores, one exchanged the solidity of dry land for the disturbing, exciting instability of these great, wilful, shrugging, heaving decks and corridors; one’s whole frame of mind was transformed, shot through with subtle thrills and titillations so that to be serene and self-possessed demanded a conscious effort; life, in fact, was changed from top to bottom; yet there remained Punnett, tolerant, deprecating, unruffled, completely the same as he had been in Bedford Square. It was as if Mr. Darby had brought Bedford Square, a solid piece of England, with him, to which, if life grew too unbearably unstable, he could anchor himself.

  He was grateful for the anchorage Punnett provided at this moment. ‘A little … ah … what I should call choppy, this morning, Punnett,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed, sir!’ said Punnett. ‘I haven’t been on deck yet, meself.’

  Mr. Darby sat down on his bed and stared at Punnett in astonishment. What had the deck to do with it? Could it be that Punnett didn’t notice this freakish behaviour of floors, doors, stairs, corridors? Next moment Mr. Darby saw that this was actually so. The cabin was still behaving, not violently, but in the self-willed manner which Mr. Darby found so disconcerting; yet Punnett, crossing the cabin to strop Mr. Darby’s razor, remained totally unaffected. It was as surprising, as supernatural as if he had cast no shadow.

  ‘The fact is, of course, Punnett,’ said Mr. Darby, ‘that you’re an … ah … an invetinary sailor. You have what I should call sea legs.’

  Punnett smiled sadly. ‘The sea never bothers me much, sir.’

  ‘Not even a great storm, Punnett? Not even a hurricane?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir. Nobody likes a storm. It gets in the way of your work, sir; and not only that, it gives you a lot of extra work to do. Last time I came home with Professor Harrington, sir, we were caught in a typhoon in the China Sea. It lasted a matter of three days, sir. It was a great inconvenience.’

  ‘You were ill, you mean?’

  Punnett smiled apologetically. ‘Oh no, not ill, sir. But things get broken and nothing’ll stay where it’s put. It’s as if the ship were turning somersaults, sir, and of course that soon becomes very irritating to the temper.’

  Mr. Darby was thoughtful for a moment or two.’ Do these … these … ah … typhoons occur often then, Punnett?’

  ‘Fairly often about this time of the year, I fancy, sir. July to October’s the season. It’s an experience of course; it shows you what nature can do, sir; but there’s no denying it’s a great inconvenience,—a very great inconvenience, a typhoon.’

  Mr. Darby rose from the bed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll … ah …! ‘Choosing a fairly stable moment he left the cabin with dignity. What was the matter with people to-day? You mention Mandratia to a man and he instantly begins to talk of cannibals; to another you drop a casual remark about the weather and he responds with horrible disclosures about typhoons. It seemed better to keep one’s mouth shut. He made for the deck, humouring the corridor and the stairs much more successfully than before. It was really rather fun, this freakish mobility of things, and it was gratifying to find that one did not feel sick. Just as he was about to step out on to the promenade deck Mr. Darby took out his watch and changed his mind. A glass of port and a biscuit would not come amiss. He turned in the direction of the smoking-room.

  • • • • • • • •

  Port and a biscuit in the middle of the morning proved to be so exactly the thing needed that Mr. Darby at once installed them as a habit. In obedience to it he entered the smoking-room three days later and, to his surprise, found Mr. Amberley and the great Gudgeon in conversation. Mr. Amberley was seated: there was a glass of wine on a table near his chair and a somewhat acid expression on his face. The great Gudgeon stood before him with a large whisky and soda, very rich in colour, in his hand.

  ‘Take my word for it,’ the great Gudgeon’s voice filled the smoking-room, ‘take my word for it, it’s a case of survival of the fittest nowadays. You can’t get past Darwin.’

  Mr. Amberley, catching sight of Mr. Darby, beckoned him to the chair beside him. ‘Mr. Gudgeon has just been telling me, Mr. Darby,’ he said, ‘that he can’t get past Darwin.’

  Mr. Darby took the offered chair. ‘To be shaw!’ he said. ‘Indeed now!’

  The great Gudgeon turned, grasped another chair, and drew it to the table. ‘I was just explaining to our friend here,’ he said to Mr. Darby, ‘that there’s far too much humanitarianism about nowadays, if you want to succeed, if you want to build up a big business—and I know what I’m talking about, mind you. I ought to, oughtn’t I?’ He put the question loudly and pointedly to Mr. Darby.

  ‘Oh … ah … to be shaw! Absolutely! Absolutely!’ Mr. Darby replied.