The little boys affected not to hear him. They had returned from their explorations, and, scratched, grubby, very hot, and rather hungry, had been given a drink from Mrs Bradley’s store and were now in pursuit of occupation. They conferred speedily as they walked.
‘Shall we go, or not?’
‘Might be grub.’
‘Not yet. It’s not twelve o’clock.’
‘Another drink? I could do with another drink.’
‘He wouldn’t think of it,’ said Ivor, who knew his father well. ‘No, it’s some rotten sweat. I vote we pretend not to hear.’
‘Is it true he’s got some snakes, do you think?’ said Kenneth.
‘As Highlanders, we can’t have anything to do with snakes,’ said Stewart.
‘Snakes?’ said Ivor. ‘Who said he’d got any snakes?’
‘You little devils,’ said Armstrong, coming upon them from the direction of the road. ‘Don’t you hear Sir Rudri calling you?’
The little boys glowered at him, but he had pointed so dramatically with his arm swung over their heads towards Sir Rudri, and had blocked their way so determinedly with his large and powerful body, that they deemed it best to give in.
‘Silly swine,’ said Kenneth, when they had turned about and Armstrong had gone on his way. ‘What’s he want to interfere for?’
‘Father’s got it in for him for getting all blotto for the Mysteries, you ass.’
‘All right, you ass, I know that.’
‘Well, use your gump, man.’
‘Oh dry up, man. Skin the wasp’s toe-nail.’
Sir Rudri said, ‘Was that Armstrong? If so, I want him here with his camera.’
‘I’ll get him, sir,’ said Stewart. He ran off, regardless of the pitiless sun which was now beating down upon the stony valley with all its midday fierceness, and, miraculously dodging boulders, broken ruins, and outcroppings of the slaty-looking rock, soon caught up with his enemy.
‘I say, Sir Rudri wants you.’
Armstrong turned with a snarl.
‘I say, honestly he does. You’ve to go over there with your camera.’
Armstrong cursed, turned sharply, and walked towards the cars to get his paraphernalia. Stewart, glad to think that the three of them were avenged, walked beside him, chatting helpfully about tripods, hypo, dark-rooms, time exposures, ciné-cameras, and the possibility of faking a photograph of murder.
‘It’s a thing I should like to see done,’ he concluded earnestly.
‘So should I – but not a fake!’ said Armstrong sourly. For so young a man he was singularly disagreeable, Mrs Bradley thought. She was seated in the foremost of the cars, and could hear his blasphemies clearly as he pulled out from the third car the things that he was in search of. She wondered what effect his language had on the gravely watching Stewart, but decided that to call attention to this point would probably do more harm to Stewart than good.
‘Isn’t he a beastly boy?’ said Cathleen, climbing in beside her. ‘I say, this leather’s hot.’
‘I don’t like him at all,’ said Mrs Bradley, watching him walk away.
‘He quite spoils the party,’ said Cathleen, with an involuntary shiver. ‘I can’t bear him.’ She hesitated, and then added: ‘Ian’s here. He came as one of the drivers. I’ve had a row with him.’
‘I recognized him,’ Mrs Bradley responded. ‘He drove the third car, with the snakes. What does Sir Rudri propose to do with the snakes? I thought they represented the god in his most insinuating form. I did not know that there had to be real snakes.’
‘I expect he knows. How glad I am that I’m not going to sleep in the camp.’
‘Are you not going to sleep in the camp, child? But, no. Of course you are not. You will spend the early hours of the darkness in making up the quarrel with Ian.’
‘I don’t know. He’s frightfully touchy, and I said – well, rather a lot about his being idiot enough to come with us here like this.’
Mrs Bradley put her head out of the window in a manner reminiscent of an old and cunning tortoise putting out its head from its shell. She looked about her, but, except for the chauffeurs, two of whom were playing some gambling game in the only patch of shade near at hand, the third standing watching them, his cap pulled over his eyes and his hands in his breeches pockets (for his dress combined a dirty tennis shirt with the lower portion of a dilapidated suit of plus-fours and a chauffeur’s cap) there was nobody anywhere within hearing.
‘Ian!’ she said with sharp clearness. The watcher swung round sharply, glanced about him, and then came over to the car.
‘Madame?’
‘Come off it, Ian,’ said Cathleen. Ian scowled at her.
‘There’s a village somewhere about,’ said Mrs Bradley conspiratorially. ‘Where are you leaving the cars?’
‘We’re to drive them just off the road.’
‘The village (probably lousy, of course) is down there, at the end of that valley. I know there are two shops, at one of which, if not also at the other, sometimes one can purchase Turkish delight. I read about it in a book.fn2 Sneak off, my children, sneak off. Mr Currie has announced his intention of sleeping in the museum, so that he will not notice his daughter’s absence from the camp. But don’t be late back in the morning.’
‘What about the other drivers?’ asked Cathleen.
‘Don’t tell me we have a friend at court,’ said Ian. He was a sun-burned, black-haired boy, long-armed, short-legged and very strongly built. He looked pugnacious, Mrs Bradley thought.
‘Of course we have,’ said his wife, in the matter-of-fact tones of her race. ‘Shall we go?’
‘There’s an unnecessary question,’ replied Ian. ‘Those lads —’ – he indicated his fellows – ‘do not speak English. And if they are any trouble I will be hitting them with my fist.’
Mrs Bradley smoothly emerged from the car, leaving the two of them together, and walked briskly, in spite of the heat, which was now intense, towards the photographer’s party.
‘After all,’ Sir Rudri was saying as she came up to him, ‘I am not sure that it was the most scientific course to follow. I am not at all sure that we shouldn’t have done better to allow the god to speak for himself, as it were.’
‘My sentiments entirely,’ said Gelert. ‘I see no object in producing the reptiles so that the god can claim the credit of manifesting himself through them. It’s surely up to him to provide his own serpents.’
‘Your tone is unnecessarily flippant,’ said his father, ‘but your point, in essence, is the same as my own. You and Armstrong had better carry them back to the car.’
‘I think,’ said Mrs Bradley, looking towards the part of the ruins in which the box of snakes had been placed, ‘that the poor creatures should at all events be exercised.’
‘If we make up our minds not to use them, then, they must at any rate be fed,’ Sir Rudri observed. ‘Are you afraid of snakes, Beatrice?’
‘I am almost the incarnation of one,’ Mrs Bradley replied. ‘I am almost always considered to be definitely reptilian in type; sometimes saurian as well – at least, I don’t know whether I mean that, but I am always one or the other.’
She was wondering how to warn Ian and Cathleen that the snakes were going to be brought back and put in the car. By this time, she reflected, they would be in the full throes of their lovers’ quarrel, or else at the commencement of making it up. Neither condition was the state in which a third party ought to find them. ‘I must beg to be allowed to look upon my relations,’ she said firmly.
Sir Rudri, who was still in two minds about the snakes – for they had been expensive, and might, he still thought, jog the memory of whatever strange force had once held power in the valley – welcomed the idea of showing them off to someone who would regard them with a reasonable amount of interest free from fear, disgust, or untutored excitement, and willingly led the way to the heavy box.
‘It looks more like a coffin than anything,’ said Armstrong, who appe
ared to have recovered the major portion of his temper. He picked up various bits of his photographic paraphernalia, and Megan and Gelert followed their father. Sir Rudri knelt down and fitted the key. Megan retreated a step or two. Mrs Bradley stood beside Sir Rudri, who, with faint chirruping noises suggestive of the sounds made by those who call chickens to be fed, lifted the lid. The audience, craning forward – most of them from the safe distance of a yard or two – were able to get a good view of what lay within the long box. Half a dozen short, thick, English vipers, with broad, flat heads and dark diamond-shaped markings, were disclosed to the shocked gaze of those of the company who knew one kind of snake from another. Sir Rudri shut the lid hastily.
‘Awkward,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Did you not inspect your purchases when you paid for them?’
‘I bought four serpents,’ said Sir Rudri, endeavouring to speak with studied calmness, ‘of the kind that snake-charmers have. I bought them from a snake-charmer! I went across to Tangier for the purpose! I really cannot conceive —’
‘Perhaps,’ said Gelert from behind his father’s shoulder, ‘this change in the kind of snake is our first manifestation of the power of Aesculapius.’
‘It’s the second or third manifestation of damned meddling and stupid practical joking, that’s what it is!’ said Alexander Currie, who had come strolling up sneering, but who now seemed angry and afraid. ‘And I’m going to find out who did it. These snakes are of no use! They’re not the right kind at all! Besides, they are quite unpleasantly dangerous!’
‘It is a good thing, then, that Aunt Beatrice wanted to see them,’ Megan observed. ‘But, father, are the vipers really dangerous?’
‘They certainly are! I should not dream of touching them, nor of allowing others to do so,’ Sir Rudri smoothly replied. Alexander looked furious.
‘I have my evidence,’ he said, turning suddenly on Sir Rudri. ‘No wonder I’m encouraged to sleep anywhere but in the camp with your other dupes!’
‘My very dear fellow,’ said Sir Rudri as though in great, though courteous, astonishment. ‘What in the name of goodness are you suggesting?’
‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ said Alexander Currie, glowering darkly. Sir Rudri’s Viking moustache, which had begun to stick out straight, thought better of it, and subsided. ‘However, there is no question now of using the serpents to-night,’ Sir Rudri observed.
‘No, indeed. We must trust only to the abilities of the god,’ said Mrs Bradley, casting a shrewd eye upon the closed box, and taking Alexander Currie off with her so that he could not make his way to the cars, if such had been his intention. It would never do for him, of all people, to know that the gregarious Ian was once again of the party, she decided.
‘The thing I can’t understand,’ said Dick to Gelert, as they also strolled off together, ‘is how the vipers came to be in the box. The whole affair is rather mysterious, isn’t it? I mean, it can’t be a mistake. Would anybody mistake a viper for anything but what it is? I mean, they’re such nasty, dangerous little brutes.’
‘I know,’ said Gelert. ‘I rather bet that Armstrong knows something about it all, but I don’t suppose he will tell us if he does. He doesn’t get on with anybody except you.’
‘Does he got on with me? I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Well, one doesn’t notice the contrary, anyhow.’
‘No, that’s true,’ said Megan, joining them. ‘But Mr Currie gets on with Armstrong, too. They are united in scorn of father, I suppose.’
‘Father’s quite bats, Megan. Still, it makes a holiday, and, to tell the truth, I’m not at all sorry to be away from Athens for a bit.’
‘Why, what have you been up to? Go away, Ronnie.’ Dick meekly took himself off.
‘Nothing. That is to say —’ Gelert looked about him, but, by wandering over the ruins which were widely scattered and partook of the nature of the stony valley itself, he and his sister had left the others a good fifty yards away. ‘I’m in rather a mess in Athens. I suppose you haven’t twenty quid you could lend me?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose I have. I’ve got most of my birthday money – it’s lucky I had nothing but cash from England – but what do you want it for?’
‘Well,’ said Gelert, glancing round again, ‘I believe that twenty quid would buy off the father. He’s sticking out for thirty, but I believe, spot cash, he’d take twenty and be glad of it, and, after all, I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. It’s only that cad Armstrong, out for what he can get.’
‘Good lord!’ said Megan. ‘Not another girl!’
Gelert’s greyhound face looked thinner and sharper than usual. It also looked rather sulky.
‘It’s all a lot of rot,’ he said. ‘We got hung up for a boat, and stayed the night on Andres, and, of course, the old idiot of a father pretends to think the worst.’
‘Did it come to that?’ asked Megan with sisterly directness.
Gelert was already slightly flushed with the heat, so that she could not tell with any certainty whether he blushed. He looked sternly and nobly at her.
‘Naturally not,’ he replied.
‘I see. You can have the money. Pay me back when you can.’
‘Oh rather. Nice of you.’ He dismissed the subject. ‘What a tick that chap Dmitri is.’
‘How especially?’
‘Toadies to Armstrong, I think. I say, Megan, does Armstrong know anything?’
‘Know anything?’
‘About Cathleen and that chap what’s-his-name?’
‘Ian?’
‘Yes.’
‘I shouldn’t think so, but he might. He is a blot on the expedition. Couldn’t you have managed the photographs?’
‘Father would drive me mad.’
‘So he would me. I expect he drives Armstrong mad. Hullo, they’re whistling us.’
Melancholy hooting from the cars – now vacated by Cathleen and the devoted, persistent Ian – announced that lunch was served. With the healthy instinct of youth, Gelert and Megan turned and walked smartly towards it.
At the meal, which was taken in the shade of large spiked umbrellas stuck upright in the ground wherever the subsoil was sufficiently yielding to allow of this being done, the chief topic of conversation among the young was the mysterious box containing, now, the vipers. The general view that the bite of these snakes was fatal was dismissed by Sir Rudri with good-humoured contempt.
‘Nonsense!’ he said, taking the word ‘Rubbish!’ out of Alexander Currie’s mouth. ‘The bite is painful and dangerous. It’s not actually fatal.’
‘What makes it dangerous, then, father?’ Ivor suddenly inquired.
‘Get on with your lunch,’ said his father. ‘I have arranged for us all to take a siesta in the museum this afternoon.’
I shouldn’t have thought there was room for all of us,’ said Cathleen, surveying the lonely little shack. ‘And suppose it has other visitors whilst we are there? Do we continue our siesta, or do we get up and make room?’
‘It is unlikely that there will be visitors here this afternoon,’ was Sir Rudri’s unreasoned reply. Nevertheless, all hoped that he would be right.
When lunch was over, and all its picnic evidences had been deleted by a fatigue party consisting of Dick and the little boys, the company was assembled in age-groups and marched off by Sir Rudri to the museum for the promised siesta.
fn1. Translation by Peter Quennell.
fn2. From Olympus to the Styx, by F. L. and Prudence Lucas. Cassell, 1934.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Then why are you crying?
There’s a smell of onions.’
1
IT WAS, AS Cathleen had observed, a very small museum, but its interior, although not particularly fresh, was a good deal cooler than the open air of the valley, and, after a cursory inspection of the exhibits and a more detailed study (insisted upon by Sir Rudri, who constituted himself lecturer) of the reconstruction plan of the temple whose ruins they had seen outside, Cathleen pillowed her hea
d on the lean abdomen of Gelert when at last they all lay down, and Megan, to poor little Ronald Dick’s excitement, laid her somewhat heavy head on his chest. The little boys lay on their backs, knees up, palms against the cool floor. Mrs Bradley, not an adept at daylight sleeping, sat with her back against a wall and wrote up her diary. Alexander Currie sat back to back with Sir Rudri, and the three chauffeurs, the two servants, and the custodian of the museum sat in a corner between marble fragments of the ruined temple and played a complicated gambling game with different-sized pieces of stone. Armstrong, who had brought his apparatus in with him, spent a short time in inspecting his camera, and then played cards with Dmitri and the two Greek chauffeurs, whom he beckoned away from their other game for the purpose.
Cramped and uncomfortable, for the most part, the company later got up, dusted itself, and went outside again. The day was still hot and the valley looked parched and arid. As though by common consent, nearly all of the pilgrims walked back across the intervening belt of land to the high bank near the theatre, climbed it, and sat down on the stone seats to converse and gaze over to the northerly mountain Titthius, or to look behind at the rising wall of Cynartium on whose lower slops the theatre in which they sat had been built.
Tea, consisting of honeycakes and water, was brought to them by Dmitri, who, whatever his shortcomings – none of which, in fact, so far, had manifested themselves to any inconvenient extent – at least possessed the gift of ingratiating cheerfulness. He bestowed food and drink and a gentle smile on everyone in turn, and shady-hatted, sun-spectacled, nose-blistered, the pilgrims received what he had to offer with careless thanks. A slight, unmistakeable feeling of depression seemed to have attacked the party, and it was with minds not very well attuned to the thought of staying up all night, as they knew they had to, that they talked in plaintive tones as they sat and ate.
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