Jaffery by William J. Locke

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Meanwhile the autumn publishing season was in full swing. Wittekind's
list of new novels in its deep black framing border stared at you from
the advertisement pages of every periodical you picked up, and so did
the list of every other publisher. Day after day Doria's eyes fell on
this announcement of Wittekind, and day after day her indignation
swelled at the continued omission of "The Greater Glory." All these
nobodies, these ephemeral scribblers, were being thrust flamboyantly on
public notice and her Adrian, the great Sun of the firm, was allowed to
remain in eclipse. For what purpose had he lived and died if his memory
was treated with this dark ingratitude? I strove to reason with her.
Adrian's book had been prodigally advertised in the spring. It had sold
enormously. It was still selling. There was no need to advertise it any
longer. Besides, advertisement cost money, and poor Wittekind had to do
his duty by his other authors. He had to push his new wares.
"Tradesman!" cried Doria. If he wasn't, I remonstrated, if he wasn't a
tradesman in a certain sense, an expert in the art of selling books, how
could Adrian's novels have attained their wide circulation? It was to
his interest to increase that circulation as much as possible. Why not
let him run his very successful business his own way? Doria loftily
assured me that she had no interest in his business, in the mere vulgar
number of copies sold. Adrian's glory was above such sordid things. Of
far higher importance was it that his name should be kept, like a
beacon, before the public. Not to do so was callous ingratitude and
tradesman's niggardliness on the part of Wittekind. Something ought to
be done. I confessed my inability to do anything.

"I know you have nothing to do with the literary side of the
executorship. Jaffery undertook it. And now, instead of looking after
his duties, he has gone on this impossible voyage."

Here was another grievance against the unfortunate Jaffery. I might have
asked her who drove him to Madagascar, for had she been kind, he would
have made short work of Liosha, after having rescued her from Fendihook,
and would have returned meekly to Doria's feet. But what would have been
the use? I was tired of these windy arguments with Doria, and worn out
with the awful irony of upholding our poor Adrian's genius.

"I'm sorry he's not here," said I, somewhat tartly, "because he might
have prevailed upon you to listen to common sense."

A little while after this, another firm of publishers announced an
_edition de luxe_ of the works of a brilliant novelist cut off like
Adrian in the flower of his age. It was printed on special paper and
illustrated by a famous artist, and limited to a certain number of
copies. This set Doria aflare. From Scotland, where she was paying one
of her restless visits, she sent me the newspaper cutting. If the
commercial organism, she said, that passed with Wittekind for a soul
would not permit him to advertise Adrian's spring book in his autumn
list, why couldn't he do like Mackenzie & Co., and advertise an _edition
de luxe_ of Adrian's two novels? And if Mackenzie & Co. thought it worth
while to bring out such an edition of an entirely second-rate author,
surely it would be to Wittekind's advantage to treat Adrian equally
sumptuously. I advised her to write to Wittekind. She did. Accompanied
by a fury of ink, she sent me his most courteous and sensible answer.
Both books were doing splendidly. There was every prospect of a golden
aftermath of cheap editions. The time was not ripe for an _edition de
luxe_. It would come, a pleasurable thing to look forward to, when other
sales showed signs of exhaustion.

"He talks about exhaustion," she wrote. "I suppose he means when he
sends the volumes to be pulped, 'remainder or waste'--there's a foolish
woman here who evidently has written a foolish book, and has shown me
her silly contract with a publisher. 'Remainder or waste.' That's what
he's thinking of. It's intolerable. I've no one, dear Hilary, to turn to
but you. Do advise me."

I sent her a telegram. For one thing, it saved the trouble of concocting
a letter, and, for another, it was more likely to impress the recipient.
It ran:

* * * * *

"I advise you strongly to go to Wittekind yourself and bite him."

I was rather pleased at the humour--may I venture to qualify it as
mordant?--of the suggestion. Even Barbara smiled. Of course, I was
right. Let her fight it out herself with Wittekind.

But I have regretted that telegram ever since.

CHAPTER XXI

Luckily, I have kept most of Jaffery's letters written to me from all
quarters of the globe. Excepting those concerned with the voyage of the
_S.S. Vesta_, they were rare phenomena. Ordinarily, if I heard from him
thrice a year I had to consider that he was indulging in an orgy of
correspondence. But what with Doria and Adrian and Liosha, and what with
Barbara and myself being so intimately mixed up in the matters which
preoccupied his mind, the voyage of the _Vesta_ covered a period of
abnormal epistolary activity. Instead of a wife, our amateur sailor
found a post office at every port. He wrote reams. He had the
journalist's trick of instantaneous composition. Like the Ouidaesque
hero, who could ride a Derby Winner with one hand, and stroke a
University Crew to victory with the other, Jaffery could with one hand
hang on to a rope over a yawning abyss, while with the other he could
scribble a graphic account of the situation on a knee-supported
writing-pad. In ordinary circumstances--that is to say in what, to
Jaffery, were ordinary circumstances--he performed these literary
gymnastics for the sake of his newspaper; but the voyage of the _Vesta_
was an exceptional affair. Save incidentally--for he did send
descriptive articles to _The Daily Gazette_--he was not out on
professional business. The gymnastics were performed for my benefit--yet
with an ulterior motive. He had sailed away, not on a job, but to
satisfy a certain nostalgia, to escape from civilisation, to escape from
Doria, to escape from desire and from heartache . . . and the deeper he
plunged into the fatness of primitive life, the closer did the poor ogre
come to heartache and to desire. He wrote spaciously, in the foolish
hope that I would reply narrowly, following a Doria scent laid down with
the naivete of childhood. I received constant telegrams informing me of
dates and addresses--I who, Jaffery out of England, never knew for
certain whether he was doing the giant's stride around the North Pole or
horizontal bar exercise on the Equator. It was rather pathetic, for I
could give him but little comfort.

Besides the letters, he (and Liosha) deluged us with photographs taken
chiefly by the absurd second mate, from which it was possible to
reconstruct the _S.S. Vesta_ in all her dismalness. You have seen scores
of her rusty, grimy congeners in any port in the world. You have only to
picture an old, two-masted, well-decked tramp with smokestack and foul
clutter of bridge-house amidships, and fore and aft a miserable bit of a
deck broken by hatches and capstans and donkey-engines and stanchions
and chains and other unholy stumbling blocks and offences to the casual
promenader. From the photographs and letters I learned that the
dog-hole, intended by the Captain for Jaffery, but given over to Liosha,
was away aft, beneath a kind of poop and immediately above the scrunch
of the propeller; and that Jaffery, with singular lack of privacy,
bunked in the stuffy, low cabin where the officers took their meals and
relaxations. The more vividly did they present the details of their
life, the more heartfelt were my thanksgivings to a merciful Providence
for having been spared so dreadful an experience.

Our two friends, however, found indiscriminate joy in everything; I have
their letters to prove it. And Jaffery especially found perpetual
enjoyment in the vagaries of Liosha. For instance, here is an extract
from one of his letters:

"It's a grand life, my boy! You're up against realities all the time.
Not a sham within the horizon. You eat till you burst, work till you
sleep, and sleep till you're kicked awake. You should just see Liosha.
Maturin says he has only met one other woman sailor like her, and that
was the daughter of a trader sailing among the Islands, who had lived
all her life since birth on his ship and had scarcely slept ashore.
She's as much born to it as any shell-back on board. She has the amazing
gift of looking part of the tub, like the stokers and the man at the
wheel. Unlike another woman, she's never in the way, and the more work
you can give her to do, the happier she is. She's in magnificent health
and as strong as a horse. At first the hands didn't know what to make of
her; now she's friends with the whole bunch. The difficulty is to keep
her from overfamiliar intercourse with them, for though she signed on as
cook's mate, she eats in the cabin with the officers, and between the
cabin and the fo'c'sle lies a great gulf. They come and tell her about
their wives and their girls and what rotten food they've got--'Everybody
has got rotten food on board ship, you silly ass!' quoth Liosha. 'What
do you expect--sweetbreads and ices?'--and what soul-shattering
blighters they've shipped with, and what deeds of heroism (mostly
imaginary) they have performed in pursuit of their perilous calling.
They're all children, you know, when you come to the bottom of them,
these hell-tearing fellows--children afflicted with a perpetual thirst
and a craving to punch heads--and Liosha's a child, too; so there's a
kind of freemasonry between them.

"There was the devil's own row in the fo'c'sle the other evening. The
first mate went to look into it and found Liosha standing enraptured at
the hatch looking down upon a free fight. There were knives about. The
mate, being a blasphemous and pugilistic dog, soon restored order. Then
he came up to Liosha--you and Barbara should have seen her--it was
sultry, not a breath of air--and she just had on a thin bodice open at
her throat and the sleeves rolled up and a short ragged skirt and was
bareheaded.

"'Why the Hades didn't you stop 'em, missus?'

"For some reason or the other, the whole ship's company, except the
skipper and myself, call her 'missus.' She gazed on him like an ox-eyed
Juno; you know her way.

"'Why should I interfere with their enjoyment?'

"'Enjoyment--!' he gasped. 'Oh, my Gawd!' He flung out his arms and came
over to me. I was smoking against the taffrail. 'There they was trying
to cut one another's throats, and she calls it enjoyment.'

"He went off spluttering. I watched Liosha. A Dutchman--what you would
call a Swede--a hulking beggar, came up from the fo'c'sle very much the
worse for wear. Liosha says:

"'Mr. Andrews was very angry, Petersen.'

"He grinned. 'He was, missus.'

"'What was it all about?'

"He explained in his sea-English, which is not the English of that
mildewed Boarding House in South Kensington. Bill Figgins had called him
a ----, he had retaliated, and the others had taken a hand, too."

It is I who suppress the actual words reported by Jaffery. But, believe
me, they were enough to annoy anybody.

"She shouted down the stairway. 'Here you, Bill Figgins, come on deck
for a minute.'

"A lean, wiry, black-looking man-spawn of the Pool of London, emerged.

"'What's the matter?'

"Why did you call Petersen a ----?' she asked pleasantly and
word-perfect.

"'Cos he is one.'

"'He isn't,' said Liosha. 'He's a very nice man. And so are you. And you
both fought fine; I was looking on, and I was mad not to see the end of
it. But Mr. Andrews doesn't like fighting. So see here, if you two don't
shake hands, right now, and make friends and promise not to fight again,
I'll not speak a word to either of you for the rest of the voyage.'

"If I had tackled them like this, hefty chap that I am, they would have
consigned me to a shambles of perdition. And if any other woman had
attempted it, even our valiant Barbara, they would have told her in
perhaps polite, but anyhow forcible, terms to mind her own business. In
either case they would have resented to the depths of their simple souls
the alien interference. But with Liosha it was different. Of course sex
told. Naturally. But she was a child like themselves. She had looked on,
placidly, and had caught the flash of knives without turning a hair.
They felt that if she were drawn into a melee she would use a knife with
the best of them. I'm panning out about this, because it seems so deuced
interesting and I should like to know what you and Barbara think. Do you
remember Gulliver? For all the world it was like Glumdalclitch making
the peace between two little nine-year-old Brobdingnagians. The two men
looked at each other sheepishly. Half a dozen grinning heads appeared at
the fo'c'sle hatch. You never saw anything so funny in your life. At
last the lean Bill Figgins stuck out his hand sideways to the Dutchman,
without looking at him.

"'All right, mate.'

"And the Swede shook it heartily, and the grimy hands cried 'Bravo,
missus!' and Liosha, turning and catching sight of me just a bit abaft
the funnel beneath the bridge, for the first time, swung up the deck
towards me, as pleased as Punch."

* * * * *

Here is another extract. . . . Well, wait for a minute.

Jaffery's letters are an embarrassment of riches. If I printed them in
full they would form a picturesque handbook to the coast of the African
continent from Casablanca in Morocco, all the way round by the Cape of
Good Hope to Port Said. But Jaffery, in his lavish way, duplicated these
travel-pictures in articles to _The Daily Gazette_, which, supplemented
by memory, he has already published in book form for all the world to
read. Therefore, if I recorded his impressions of Grand Bassam, Cape
Lopez, Boma, Matadi, Delagoa Bay, Montirana, Mombasa and other
apocalyptic places, I should be merely plagiarising or infringing
copyright, or what-not; and in any case I should be introducing matter
entirely irrelevant to this chronicle. You must just imagine the rusty
_Vesta_ wallowing along, about nine knots an hour, around Africa,
disgorging cotton goods and cheap jewelry at each God-forsaken port, and
making up cargo with whatever raw material could find a European market.
If I had gone this voyage, I would tell you all about it; but you see, I
remained in England. And if I subjected Jaffery's correspondence to
microscopic examination, and read up blue books on the exports and
imports of all the places on the South African coast line, and told you
exactly what was taken out of the _S.S. Vesta_ and what was put into
her, I cannot conceive your being in the slightest degree interested. To
do so, would bore me to death. To me, cargo is just cargo. The
transference of it from ship to shore and from shore to ship is a matter
of awful noise and perspiring confusion. I have travelled, in so-called
comfort, as a first-class passenger to Africa. I know all about it.
Generally, the ship cannot get within quarter of a mile of the shore. On
one side of it lies a fleet of flat-bottomed lighters manned by
glistening and excited negroes. On board is a donkey-engine working a
derrick with a Tophetical clatter. Vast bales and packing cases are
lifted from the holds. A dingily white-suited officer stands by with
greasy invoice sheets, while another at the yawning abyss whence the
cargo emerges makes the tropical day hideous with horrible imprecations.
And the merchandise swings over the side and is received in the lighter,
by black uplifted arms, in the midst of a blood-curdling babel of
unmeaning ferocity. That is all that unloading cargo means to me; and I
cannot imagine that it means any more to any of the sons or daughters of
men who are not intimately concerned in a particular trade. . . . You
must imagine, I say, the _S.S. Vesta_ repeating this monotonous
performance; Jaffery and Liosha and the little, black-bearded skipper,
all clad in decent raiment, going ashore, and being entertained
scraggily or copiously by German, French, Portuguese, English,
fever-eyed commissioners, who took them on the _tour du proprietaire_,
among the white wooden government buildings, the palm-covered huts of
the natives, and shewed them the Mission Chapels and the new Custom
Houses and the pigeon-like fowls and the little dirty naked nigger
children, and the exiguity of their stock of glass and china, and the
yearning of their souls for the fleshpots of the respective Egypts to
which they belonged. You must imagine this. If anything relevant to the
story of Jaffery, which, as you will remember, is all that I have to
relate, happened at any of these ports, I should tell you. I should have
chapter and verse for it in Jaffery's letters. But as far as I can make
out, the moment they put foot on shore, they behaved like the
best-conducted globe-trotters who dwell habitually in a semi-detached
residence in Peckham Rye. I know Jaffery will be furious when he reads
this. But great is the Truth, and it shall prevail. It was on the sea,
away from ports and mission stations and exiles hungering for the last
word of civilisation, and shore-going clothes, that life as depicted by
Jaffery swelled with juiciness; and to my taste, the juiciest parts of
his letters are those humoristically concerned with the doings of
Liosha.

As to his hopeless passion for Doria, he says very little. When Jaffery
put pen to paper he was objective, loving to describe what he saw and
letting what he felt go hang. In consequence the shy references to Doria
were all the more poignant by reason of their rarity. But Liosha was the
central figure in many a picture.

Here, I say, is another extract:

"Liosha continues to thrive exceedingly. But there's one thing that
worries me about her. What the blazes are we going to do with her
after this voyage? No doubt she would like to keep on going round
and round Africa for the rest of her life. But I can't go with her.
I must get back and begin to earn my living. And I don't see her
settling down to afternoon tea and respectability again. I think
I'll have to set her up as a gipsy with a caravan and a snarling
tyke for company. How a creature with her physical energy has
managed to lie listless for all these months I can't imagine. It
shews strength of character anyway. But I don't see her putting in
another long stretch. . . .

"She has taken her position as cook's mate seriously, and shares
the galley with the cook, a sorrow-stricken little Portugee whose
wife ran away with another man during the last trip. He pours out
his woes to her while she wipes away the tears from the lobscouse.
I don't know how she stands it, for even I, who've got a pretty
strong stomach, draw the line at the galley. But she loves it. Now
and again, when it's my watch--I'm on the starboard watch, you
know--I see her turn out in the morning at two bells. She stands
for a few moments right aft of her cabin-door, and fills her lungs.
And the wind tugs at her hair beneath her cap, and at her skirts,
and the spindrift from the pale grey sea of dawn stings at her
face; and then she lurches like a sailor down the wet, slanting
deck--and I can tell you, she looks a devilish fine figure of a
woman. And soon afterwards there comes from the galley the smell of
bacon and eggs--my son, if you don't know the conglomerate smell of
fried bacon and eggs, bilge water, and the salt of the pure early
morning ocean, your ideas of perfume are rudimentary. She and the
Portugee between them, he contributing the science and she the
good-will, give us excellent grub; of course you would turn your
nose up at it--but you've never been hungry in your life! and there
hasn't been a grumble in the cabin. Maturin has offered her the
permanent job. Certainly she looks after us and attends to our
comforts in a way sailor men on tramps aren't accustomed to. She's
a great pal of the second mate's and at night they play
spoiled-five at a corner of the table, with the greasiest pack of
cards you ever saw, and she's perfectly happy.

"Now and again we discuss the future, without arriving at any
result. A day or two ago I chaffed her about marriage. She
considered the matter gravely.

"'I guess I'll have to. I'm twenty-four. But I haven't had much
luck so far, have I?'

"I replied: 'You won't always strike wrong 'uns.'

"'I don't know what kind of a man I'm going to strike,' she said.
'Not any of those little billy-goats in dinner jackets I used to
meet at Mrs. Jardine's. No, sirree. And no more Ras Fendihooks!'

"She rose--we had been sitting on the cabin sky-light--and leaned
over the taffrail and looked wistfully out to sea. I joined her.
She was silent for a bit. Then she said:

"'I guess I'm not going to marry at all; for I'm not going to marry
a man I don't love, and I couldn't love a man who couldn't beat
me--and there ain't many. That's the kind of fool way I'm built.'

"She turned and left me. I suppose she meant it. Liosha doesn't
talk through her hat. But if she ever does fall in love with a man
who can beat her, there'll be the devil to pay. Liosha in love
would be a tornado of a spectacle. But I shouldn't like it.
Honest--I shouldn't like it. I've got so used to this clean great
Amazon of a Liosha, that I should loathe the fellow were he as
decent a sort as you please."

It is curious to observe how, as the voyage proceeded, Jaffery's horizon
gradually narrowed to the small shipboard circle, just as an invalid's
interests become circumscribed by the walls of his sick-room. He tells
us of childish things, a catch of fish, a quarrel between the first and
second mate over Liosha, second having accused first of a disrespectful
attitude towards the lady, the sail-cloth screen rigged up aft behind
which Liosha had her morning tub of sea-water, the stubbing of Liosha's
toe and her temporary lameness, the illness of the Portugee cook and
Liosha's supremacy in the galley. And he wrote it all with the air of
the impresario vaunting the qualities of his prima donna, nay more--with
a fatuous air of proprietorship, as though he himself had created
Liosha.

Here is the beginning of another letter, addressed to us both:

"A thousand thanks, dearest people, for what you tell me of Doria.
If she just misses me a little bit, all may be well. I've bought
some jolly gold barbaric ornaments that she may accept when I reach
home; and do try to persuade her that the poor old bear is rough
only on the outside.

"Things going on just as usual. Liosha has got a monkey given her
by the donkey-man. . . ."

There follows a description of the monkey and its antics, and a long
account of a chase all over the ship, in which all the ship's company
including the captain took part, to the subversion of discipline and
navigation. But you see--he switches off at once to Liosha and the
trivial records of the humdrum day.

At last he had something less trivial to write about. They were in the
Mozambique Channel, making for Madagascar:

"Now that this darned cabin table is comparatively straight, I can
scribble a few lines to you. We've had a beast of a time. The
dirtiest weather ever since we left Beira and the cranky old tub
rolling and pitching and standing on her head as I've never known
ship do before. Consequence was the cargo got shifted and there was
a list to port, so that every time she ducked that side, she
shipped half the channel. Skies black as thunder and the sea the
colour of inky water. We had the devil's own job getting the cargo
straight. Just imagine a black rolling dungeon full of great
packing cases weighing about half a ton each all gone murderous
mad. Just imagine getting down among them, as practically all hands
had to do, save the engine-room, and sweating and fighting and
straining and lashing for hour after hour. And half the time the
port side of the lame old duck under water. How she didn't turn
turtle is known only to Allah and Maturin; and One is great and the
other's a damned fine sailor. Of course, I had to go down into the
inferno of the hold like the others. Part of the day's work; but I
didn't like it; no one liked it.

"When the order was given all hands tumbled up to the hatchway and
began swarming down the iron ladder. It was a swaying, staggering
crowd. When you stand on a wet deck at an angle of forty-five
degrees one way and thirty degrees another and constantly shifting
both angles, with nothing but a rope lashed athwart the ship to
catch hold of, your mind is pretty well concentrated on yourself. I
know mine was. I slipped and wallowed on my belly hanging on to the
rope like grim death till my turn came for the ladder. I got my
feet on the rungs. I was all right, when looking up into the livid
daylight whom do you think I saw calmly preparing to follow me?
Liosha. I hadn't noticed her. She had sea-boots and a jersey and
looked just like a man. I roared:

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