Captivity Part 23

"Does it ever do things now?" she asked rather breathlessly.

"Oh yes. Listen!" She heard faint reports like distant small guns being fired. "With any luck it'll give us a bit of a Crystal Palace Bank Holiday exploit to-night--we sail at midnight, you know. It will be rather gorgeous if the old bonfire will oblige. Red fires, white and silver moonlight--why Naples is making me get poetical," he added, stopping short.

People began to come on deck: the schoolmaster walked along, his finger in between two pages of a Baedeker in which he was going to count off the items of interest he encountered.

"Good morning, Miss Lashcairn!" he said with a smile. "See Naples and die!"

"Oh no--it's too beautiful!" she said quickly. Louis edged her along the deck as a little clatter of church bells pealed from the many spires rising above the tall brown houses of the town. A motor-launch chuff-chuffed out from the quay, flying the yellow flag.

"Port doctor," he informed her. "If he gives us a clean bill we'll be ash.o.r.e the minute breakfast's over. And I say, Marcella, let me _implore_ you not to have Jimmy or schoolmasters in attendance. This is _my_ show."

She smiled at him and turned to watch three boys scrambling up the ladder after the port doctor, carrying great baskets of grapes and flowers and oranges.

"I'm going to buy you some grapes--those whopping big black ones. It seems the obvious thing to do in Naples, doesn't it? Oh, by the way, I must pay a visit to the Bank of Scotland. You'd better give me five pounds."

"You're very extravagant," she laughed.

"Never mind. Any other trip I've been broke by this time, and in a devil of a mess as well. Lord knows what these bally dagoes will charge us for a car out to Pompeii. They're all on the make. But I don't care if they charge thirteen pounds--"

"Eight and fivepence," she added, laughing at him and running below to unlock her trunk and bring him the money without a glimmer of apprehension.

She put the five pounds into his hand in the alley-way. A minute later he was back with an enormous bunch of grapes lying amongst their green leaves.

"Lock your door when you come on deck, and shut your porthole," he told her. "We're coaling, and coal dust gets everywhere--in your eyes, your finger-nails, your food and your bed if you don't hermetically seal them all. It's a good place to be away from, a coaling ship."

He darted away before she could mention the grapes. She helped Jimmy dress, and then, turning him out, examined her three white frocks with minute care to see in which she should do honour to Pompeii. Often, in the past, she had dressed a part, but always her personality had been lost in the part she was playing. Now she consciously dressed as Marcella; it was probably the first time in her life she had looked interestedly in a mirror; comparing herself with Mrs. Hetherington, she felt vaguely dissatisfied: she wished she were much nicer. Noticing the vine leaves where she had twined them round the rail of her bunk, she broke off two or three and tucked them in her dress at the waist.

Stepping back, she surveyed the effect, decided that it was as good as could be managed, and tapped at the part.i.tion. She had heard Louis moving about some time before.

There was no answer, and she decided that he must have gone on deck.

It was crowded with pa.s.sengers waiting for the little boats to take them ash.o.r.e; Italians went here and there selling fruit, postcards and jewellery straight from Birmingham; two flat coal lighters were drawing ponderously alongside. She could not see Louis.

From end to end she searched the ship, even going on to the upper deck, which to-day was not sacred to the upper-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers. But he was nowhere to be seen. A lump came into her throat, her knees felt a little shaky.

Going below again she saw Knollys looking about eagerly.

"Oh, there you are, miss. Mr. Fame desired me to give you this. He was considerably hurried."

She took it with a word of thanks--a little note, folded three cornerwise.

"I'm more sorry than I can say," she read. "The port doctor was an old St. Crispin's man. He noticed me on deck and spoke. He and I were great pals at the hospital, and he asked me to go ash.o.r.e with him. He remembered how keen I was on gynecology, and has a queer case he'd like me to look at. It's his wife as a matter of fact. I made all sorts of excuses, but he seemed so hurt I had to give way. I know this will disappoint you horribly, but it seems unavoidable. I'll cut away as soon as I can, and we'll still go to Pompeii. After all, I hear we don't sail till one o'clock, so there'll be time--we'll come back in the moonlight.

Give my love to Jimmy and the schoolmaster.--L.F."

To her amazement she felt tears begin to p.r.i.c.k her eyelids. She blinked fiercely.

"Well, of all the babies! Did it cry because it was wanting to go out, then?" she cried indignantly, and stood watching the coal bunkers being opened. But she could not see much; she was thinking of Louis.

"You'll get filthy here!" said the third officer behind her, "and most uncomfortable. I should advise you to go ash.o.r.e."

"I can't. I'm waiting for someone," she explained.

"Then I'd go up on the boat deck. You've no idea how abominable it gets down here. Coaling should be prohibited by Act of Parliament."

"Which is the boat-deck?" she asked, glad that her voice was sensible again. He pointed, and she turned away.

The ship was deserted, practically; everyone had gone ash.o.r.e. She went disconsolately towards the stairway. On the bottom step sat Jimmy sobbing dismally.

"There they are!" he said, rubbing his eyes with one hand and pointing to a little boat out on the blue water. "I did so want to go with them."

Mrs. Hetherington in a white frock and blue sash was waving her hand gaily from the little boat. Marcella suddenly felt indignant with her, and took Jimmy's tear-stained hand.

"There they are!" she said, smiling. "And here are we! We're both in the same boat, old man. Come down to my little house. I've something nice there."

She broke off a big bunch of grapes for him and, taking pencils, books and writing-paper, went back on deck. Two Italians were just going off with a stock of postcards. She bought a dozen for Jimmy, and a little basket of strawberries.

"Now you're going to be a big man, Jimmy. We're going right up on the roof of the ship, and you're having a chair all to yourself so that you can write postcards to Gran."

His face cleared immediately, though as they got settled in the shadow of one of the lifeboats and he saw Mrs. Hetherington's white figure walking along the quay he gave a little sigh. She addressed his postcards as far as his remembered stock of addresses would go. Several Aunties who lived "along Gran's street and along the next and over the field" had to be left out. As soon as postcard writing palled a sailor came along providentially, took him to see the hen coops, and let him find two eggs that had been laid.

Marcella wrote long letters home; only to Wullie did she mention Louis, and even to him she said very little.

Noon came, and the boat deck was very hot. The chiming of bells in the churches told when the moment of the Elevation came and pa.s.sed; the little reports sounded from the old mountain: she thought they sounded like guns that had been fired a thousand years ago. Jimmy said he didn't feel well, and went to sleep after a while; an Italian boy with black, hyacinthine curls and swimming black eyes spied her white frock from his little boat out in the bay: tying up to the accommodation ladder, he stood singing a pa.s.sionate song to the tw.a.n.ging of a guitar. She wondered whether this were a personal tribute or a way of earning money.

The cap he held out for a coin showed it was the one; his eloquent eyes and picturesque gestures as he begged her little withering bunch of vine leaves showed it was the other. She tossed them to him carelessly, and he bowed and kissed them gracefully.

At last the family parties began to come on board, with hot, tired mothers, cross children and disillusioned fathers; then came the emigrant girls, their hats covered in bright flowers. They were hustled below by the third officer, who was superintending the sluicing of the dusty, black decks. As Marcella went slowly below with Jimmy she heard him declaring that coaling was the bane of his existence, as he pointed out to the ship's doctor marks of black hands deliberately printed high up on the shining white paint.

When she had finished her letters Marcella sat for a while perfectly still while Jimmy slept and the fowls in the coops crooned. Down below in the bunkers the coal went thudding faintly, heard up on the boat deck more as vibrations than sounds, mingling with the tinkling of guitars, the lazy splash of oars; somewhere a man with a voice like a rook was cawing:

"A mother was chay-sing her boy round the room, She was chay-sing her boy round the room"

over and over again. Somewhere at the end of a ventilator shaft a man was polishing boots; he was swearing monotonously, between each rub of his brush, using a list of twelve words beginning with "blast" uttered very softly and increasing in volume of sound and violence of meaning at the twelfth word, when he would start pianissimo again. Marcella's eyes closed; she was not asleep, she was thinking very vividly of Louis, but all the murmur of sounds about her intruded on her consciousness, making clear thought impossible. The peculiar languor of shipboard life seized upon her mind and her body: when she went below both were partly anaesthetized; her feet scarcely felt the boards of the deck; her fingers were scarcely conscious of the letters and books she held. Her eyes and her mind took in the returning pa.s.sengers dully.

"You look half asleep, kid," said Diddy with sparkling eyes. "We didn't half have a day of it! Young Bill and Mr. Winkle both got sh.o.r.e leaf, and Mr. Winkle knew a man who keeps a little cafe. He was once chef where Mr. Winkle was a.s.sistant chef in an hotel. My, we didn't half have a tuck in! Oysters and funny things in French, and chicken done up with jam, and ices. We went to Pompey in the afternoon, but I couldn't move, I was that stuffed up! My, it was a day and a half! Where did you get to?"

"Oh, just about with Jimmy."

"Where's your young chap?" asked Diddy in surprise.

Marcella stared at her and flushed. The schoolmaster came up to her and stood silent beside her. He was very full of Naples. His shoes were dustless, though everyone else was covered in the fine, impalpable powdery dust of Naples. His high collar was spotless, his coat incredibly black. He looked irresistibly as if he had been lay-reading.

"I was hoping that I might have had the pleasure of your company during my journeyings to-day, Miss Lashcairn," he began after a little cough.

"But I was--er--afraid to intrude."

"I stayed on board with Jimmy," she explained. "Did you have a good time?"

"One cannot have a good time in the tomb of past splendours," he said slowly. "Imperial Cesar dead and turned to clay stopping a hole to keep the wind away is indeed a tragedy to a sensitive mind. But to see Imperial Pompeii desecrated by ginger-beer bottles, cigarette packets and spent matches--it was more than tragic. It was--it was--but I pause for a word! All the time I was murmuring sadly to myself '_Sic transit gloria mundi_.'"

"I'm quite glad I didn't go if it was so bad as that," she said.