If half the art of survival is running, the other half is keeping a straight face. I can’t count the number of times my fate has depended on my response to some unexpected and abominable proposal – like the night Yakub Beg suggested I join a suicidal attempt to scupper some Russian ammunition ships, or Sapten’s jolly notion about swimming naked into a gothic castle full of Bismarck’s thugs, or Brooke’s command to me to lead a charge against a head-hunters’ stockade. Jesu, the times that we have seen. (Queer, though, the one that lives in memory is from my days as a snivelling fag at Rugby when Bully Dawson was tossing the new bugs in blankets, and grabbed me, gloating, and I just hopped on to the blanket, cool as you please for all my bowels were heaving in panic, and the brute was so put out that he turfed me off in fury, as I’d guessed he would, and I was spared the anguish of being tossed while the other fags were put through it, howling.)
At all events – and young folk with their way to make in the world should mark this – you must never suppose that a poker face is sufficient. That shows you’re thinking, and sometimes the appearance of thought ain’t called for. It would have been fatal now, with Susie; I had to show willing quick, but not too much – if I cried aloud for joy and swept her into my arms, she’d smell a large whiskered rat. It all went through my mind in an instant, more or less as follows: 1, I’m married already; 2, she don’t know that; 3, if I don’t accept there’s a distinct risk she’ll show me the door, although she might not; 4, if she does, I’ll get hung; 5, on balance, best to cast myself gratefully at her feet for the moment, and think about it afterwards.
All in a split second, as I say – just time for me to stare uncomprehending for two heart-beats, and then let a great light of joy dawn in my eyes for an instant, gradually fading to a kind of ruptured awe as I took a hesitant step forward, dropped on one knee beside her, took her hand gently, and said in husky disbelief:
‘Susie … do you really mean that?’
Whatever she’d expected, it hadn’t been that – she was watching me like a hawk, between hope and mistrust. She knew me, you see, and what a damned scoundrel I was – at the same time, she was bursting to believe that I cared for her, and I knew just how to trade on that. Before she could reply, I smiled, and shook my head sadly, and said very manly:
‘Dear Susie, you’re wrong, you know. I ain’t worth it.’
She thought different, of course, and said so, and a pretty little debate ensued, in which I was slightly hampered by the fact that she had clamped my face between her udders and was ecstatically contradicting me at the top of her voice; I acted up with nice calculation, as though masking gallons of ardour beneath honest doubt – I didn’t know, I said, because no woman had ever – well, honoured me with true love before, and rake that I’d been, I’d grown to care for her too much to let her do something she might repent … you may imagine this punctuated by loving babble from her until the point where I thought, now for the coup de grâce, and with a muffled, despairing groan of ‘Ah, my darling!’ as though I couldn’t contain myself any longer, gave her the business for all I was worth on top of her dressing-stool. God knows how it stood the strain, for we must have scaled twenty-two stone between us, easy.
Even when it was done, I still did a deal of head-shaking, an unworthy soul torn between self-knowledge and the dawning hope that the love of a good woman might be just what he needed. I didn’t do it too strong; I didn’t need to; she was over the main hurdle and ready to convince herself against all reason. That’s what love does to you, I suppose, although I don’t speak from personal experience.
‘I know I’m foolish,’ says she, all earnest and sentimental, ‘an’ that you’re the kind of rascal that could break my ’eart … but I’ll take my chance o’ that. I reckon you like me, an’ I ’ope you’ll like me more. Love grows,’ says the demented biddy, ‘an’ while I’m forty-two—’ she was pushing fifty, I may say ‘—an’ a bit older than you, that don’t ’ave to signify. An’ I reckon – please don’t mind me sayin’ this, dearest – that even at worst, you might settle for me bein’ well-off, which I am, an’ able to give you a comfortable life, as well as all the love that’s in me. It’s no use sayin’ practical things don’t matter, ’cos they do – an’ I wouldn’t expect you to have me if I was penniless. But you know me, an’ that when I say I can make a million, it’s a fact. You can be a rich man, with me, an’ ’ave everythin’ you could wish for, an’ if you was to say “aye” on those terms, I’d understand. But I reckon—’ she couldn’t keep the tears back, as she held my chin and stroked my whiskers and I looked like Galahad on his vigil ‘—I reckon you care for me enough, anyway – an’ we can be happy together.’
I knew better than to be fervent. I just nodded, and ran a pin from her dressing-table into my leg surreptitiously to start a tear. ‘Thank you, Susie,’ says I quietly and kissed her gently. ‘Now don’t cry. I don’t know about love, but I know …’ I took a fairish sigh ‘… I know that I can’t say no.’
That was the God’s truth, too, as I explained to Spring half an hour later, for while he wasn’t the man you’d seek out to discuss your affairs of the heart, it was our necks that were concerned here, and he had to be kept au fait. He gaped at me like a landed shark.
‘But you’re married!’ cries he.
‘Tut-tut,’ says I, ‘not so loud. She doesn’t know that.’
He glared horribly. ‘It’s bigamy! Lord God Almighty, have you no respect for the sacraments?’
‘To be sure – which is why I don’t intend our union to last any farther than California, when I’ll—’
‘I won’t have it!’ snarls he, and that wild glitter came into his pale eyes. ‘Is there no indecency beneath you? Have you no fear of God, you animal? Will you fly in the face of His sacred law, damn your eyes?’
I might have expected this, when I came to think of it. Not the least of Captain Spring’s eccentricities was that while he’d got crimes on his conscience that Nero would have bilked at, he was a fanatic for the proprieties, like Sunday observance and afternoon tea – he’d drop manacled niggers overboard at a sight of the white duster, but he was a stickler when it came to lining out the hymns while his equally demented wife pumped her accordion and his crew of brigands sang ‘Let us with a gladsome mind’. All the result of boning up the Thirty-nine Articles, I don’t doubt.
‘What else could I do?’ I pleaded, while he swore and stamped about the room, snarling about blasphemy and the corruption of the public school system. ‘The old faggot as good as promised that if I didn’t take her, she’d whistle up the pigs.3 Don’t you see – if I jolly her along, it’s a safe passage out, and then, goodbye Mrs Willinck. Or Comber, as the case may be. But if I jilt her, it’s both our necks!’ I near as told him I’d done it before, with Duchess Irma in Strackenz, but from the look of him he’d have burst a blood vessel, with luck.
‘Why in God’s name did I ever ship you aboard the College?’ cries he, clenching his hands in fury. ‘You’re a walking mass of decay, porcus ex grege diaboli!’fn1 But he wasn’t too far gone to see reason, and calmed down eventually. ‘Well,’ says he, giving me his most baleful glower, ‘if your forehead is brazen enough for this – God have mercy on your soul. Which he won’t. Bah! Why the hell should I care? I can say with Ovid, video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.fn2 Now, get out of my sight!’
He’d given me a scare, though, I can tell you. Even now, I couldn’t be sure that some quirk of that diseased mind wouldn’t make him blurt out to Susie that her intended was already a husband and father. So I was doubly uneasy, and puzzled, when Susie bade the pair of us that night to a supper party à trois in her salon – we’d had our meals on trays in our rooms since our arrival, and besides, I knew Susie’s