Appleby on Ararat Read online

  “There is one incarnation myth in particular–”

  “Ah!” Mr Hoppo began to peer about him. “I wonder where I can have left–”

  “Mr Hoppo,” said Miss Curricle, “is a clergyman.” She spoke with a severity which ambiguity rendered formidable. “I am a good deal interested myself–”

  Mrs Kittery interrupted. Her eyes, the quiet young man noted, had been widening upon the newcomer as he rather wished they would widen on him; now he spoke at her most eager. “About that zoo,” she asked; “that zoo in London. Would you say they feed the animals as they ought?”

  “No.” He was looking at her without complicity or surprise, but there was a remote and understanding mischief in his voice; perhaps, the young man thought, he had an extra and primitive sense or two tucked away. “No. In point of strict diatetics it may be sound enough. But the tastes of the creatures are inadequately consulted. Take the hippopotamus: the hippopotamus must have mangoes.”

  “The hippopotamuses always have mangoes in Australia,” said Mrs Kittery, and paused to garner a displeased sound from Miss Curricle. “And custard-apples – is that right?” She was looking up with great innocence into the black man’s eyes.

  “Perfectly right,” said the black man. He looked quickly at Colonel Glover, who had menacingly coughed. “In moderation, of course.”

  “Of course.” Mrs Kittery offered the black man potato crisps, and at this Mr Hoppo coughed too. “Do you know,” she said suddenly, “I’ve just thought of the title of a book?”

  “Indeed?” enquired Mr Hoppo, and made disapproving faces behind the black man’s back. “It would scarcely have occurred to me that you were an authoress.”

  “I’m not. But sometimes I like to think of books it would be fun to write.” Mrs Kittery’s remarks were now addressed with frankly wanton concentration to the black man only. “This one is the result” – she hesitated for a phrase – “of the association of ideas. Is that right?”

  The black man laughed, and his laugh like his accent was at once correct and disturbingly alive. “I can’t tell,” he said, “–until I know the title.”

  “It’s–” Mrs Kittery collapsed into mirth. “It’s–” She collapsed again. “It’s Mr Hoppo’s Hippo.” And she laughed the quick clear laugh of one who enjoys great simplicity of mind.

  Because there would be incivility in either laughter or a stony face, the black man smiled. He smiled at the now almost contiguous Mrs Kittery. And his smile, perhaps because it had a richness and an otherness that matched his voice, was too much for Colonel Glover. The proprieties of Poona, the convictions of Kuala-Lumpur, rose in him. “A British lady–” he began, and paused upon finding the quiet young man planted squarely in his path.

  “Quite an Imperial occasion,” said the young man cheerfully. “We only want a convinced Irishman and harmony would be complete.”

  There was an uncertain silence.

  “The sun never sets on us. So at least it can’t go down upon our wrath.” He laughed swiftly, rather as one draws children to laugh at nothing very much. “I think,” he added inconsequently, “I see the bugler just starting on his round.”

  “Um.” Colonel Glover looked awkwardly at his watch. “One o’clock.”

  “Luncheon,” said Mr Hoppo, still rather pink from digesting his hippo. “One had no idea.”

  Miss Curricle rose. “The sky and the sea,” she said magnificently, “are miraculously blue.”

  “But I really believe” – Mr Hoppo roguishly beamed – “that the sky has it, after all.”

  “No: I must admit that the sea–”

  “And it’s all so peaceful,” said Mrs Kittery. “Nothing, perhaps, within a hundred miles. It’s all so” – she searched for an enormous word – “so inviolate.”

  “‘Compass’d by the inviolate sea,’” said Mr Hoppo in the special voice of clergymen when they are making a cultural reference.

  “Dear Lord Tennyson,” said Miss Curricle, unconsciously quoting, perhaps, words which had impressed her nursery years.

  “Peaceful,” said Colonel Glover. “That’s it. Utterly peaceful. We’re right out of it. That’s what’s so strange. So out of it that one can hardly believe in it. That’s what’s so dashed odd.”

  There was a pause in which they looked at one another soberly. Then Mr Hoppo spoke from the side. “Miss Curricle, I can see a whale.”

  Miss Curricle almost archly smiled. “Now, Mr Hoppo–”

  But Mr Hoppo was frowning. “At least I think–”

  And at this moment it happened. The ship shivered. The universe turned to a gigantic runaway lift. To that and to one vast explosion deep in the heart of which could be heard the tiny tinkle of broken cocktail glasses.

  Mr Hoppo had not seen a whale.

  2

  “The wise men of Gotham found themselves in a not dissimilar situation.” As she enunciated this Miss Curricle slithered cautiously on the plate-glass and curiously regarded the depths below. “There is nothing in sight?”

  The black man, perched hazardously on the ruins of the bar, shook his head. “Od’ und leer das Meer.”

  “You could scarcely have recourse to a less suitable language.”

  “The wise men of Gotham presumably spoke it.”

  “Would anyone care,” Mr Hoppo asked, “for a Gilded Lady or a Raspberry Spider?”

  The sun-deck café – except that it had turned upside down – was much as it had been. But the liner of which it had formed so inconsiderable a part was gone, and – wrenched away – the café floated grotesquely upon an empty ocean under an empty sky. Angry and oddly exalted, the six people left above water had established a tone which was civilised and dry. It was like a hastily-rigged emotional jury-mast. Each no doubt wondered for how long it would serve.

  Colonel Glover was making a tour of inspection. “One heard some odd effects of high explosive in Spain,” he said. “Fellows blown on the roofs of churches and left to cling there unharmed. That sort of thing. But nothing quite so deuced odd as this.” He poked at the structure beneath him. “The frame is chrome steel and the glass inch-thick and bedded in rubber, so it’s strong enough. Rides nicely, too. Trim her a bit, though, with advantage. Hoppo, just shift that case of Vichy-Celestins a bit to starboard – beside Mr–”

  “Appleby,” said the quiet young man.

  “Appleby. Glover’s my name. Lancers.”

  “CID.”

  Colonel Glover blinked in the seeping sunshine. “Beg pardon?”

  “A policeman.”

  “Bless my soul. Most unexpected. Precious little traffic to direct hereabouts, I’m afraid.” Colonel Glover chuckled doubtfully and his eye searched the horizon – perhaps for social bearings. “Happen to know my nephew, Rupert Ounce?”

  “He was my assistant last year.”

  “Ah.” Glover was relieved. “Well, now we all know each other. Except–” He glanced upwards at the black man.

  “Unumunu,” said the black man gravely.

  “Mr Unumunu.”

  On a large square of plate-glass Mrs Kittery was lying on her stomach, watching small fishes darting an inch beneath her nose. Now she turned round on her back. “But perhaps you are a prince?” she asked.

  The black man smiled brilliantly. “Once upon a time, as it happens, I was a king. And after that I was knighted. I am Sir Ponto Unumunu.”

  “Sir Ponto!” said Colonel Glover, startled. “I once had–” He checked himself.

  “In my language Ponto means ‘circumspect in battle.’ It is not perhaps a very good name for a knight who is now commonly one who has been circumspect in trade. Miss Curricle, here I think is a comfortable chair.”

  “Thank you, Sir Ponto.”

  On curves of steel, on strips of vivid red leather, Miss Curricle s
wayed upon the Pacific Ocean. It was calm with only the deep sea swell; the waters were like a vast big dipper, flattened out and slowed down for a wealthy cardiac patient; the sky held a blue as hard as bronze; the sun stood absolute in its heaven. The inverted dome of the café thrust down into the unknown element – a dream aquarium against which the wandering sharks and devil-fish might press curious noses, wondering at the spidery-limbed creatures within.

  “Six syphons and a case of mineral-water,” said Mr Hoppo, who was counting the unbroken stores. “Whisky, brandy, port, madeira, sherry – fino, I am glad to say – and a large number of liqueurs. An ice-box but no ice – that was what the steward, poor fellow, had gone to get a supply of. Caviare – an uncommonly big pot. A tin of biscuit-things to serve it on. Stuffed olives. Potato crisps, salted almonds, anchovies, pretzel-sticks: everything, in fact, to encourage a brisk traffic at the bar. A tin of salt, no doubt to give everything a sprinkle of from time to time. Glover, there is irony in this.”

  “A thing for doing the fizzing to shakes,” said Mrs Kittery, who had crossed to the debris of the soda fountain. “It’s electric, so it won’t be much good.” She sighed her disappointment. “A packet of straws. A flagon of vanilla flavouring, not even cracked, and a label on the back saying it’s enough for forty gallons. A tub of cream, swizzle sticks, cherries, quite a lot of tinned fruit for making melbas and sundaes.” Innocent satisfaction was creeping into her voice. “Ice cream, raspberry balm, glacé pineapple–”

  “Cigars,” said Miss Curricle, tapping a box with her toe. She spoke gloomily, as if this further useless discovery were a luckless materialisation of her own will. “And two fire-extinguishers.”

  “Possibly a sail.” Appleby had found an inverted cupboard near a fragment of what had been the floor, and he was hauling out an enveloping sheet. “They swathed the soda fountain with it at night. But what about a mast?”

  “Up here,” said Unumunu, “the teak is mostly three by three-quarters. But there’s one joist three by three. If we could step it–”

  “And rig that counter as a rudder,” said Glover.

  “With a table-leg,” said Hoppo, “for tiller–”

  Miss Curricle, steadying herself as the café tilted and slid down a smooth gradient of water, opened her book. “While you are all busy with these technical things,” she said, “I shall read aloud. It will be well to mention that the book is called Tonga Trench and is a work of scientific oceanography. Dealing as it does with the ocean-bed in certain areas of the Pacific it is of particular interest in our present situation.”

  The café was moving slowly skywards with the motion of an escalator; on the crest of the swell it wobbled and a flip of spray whipped them; it gave a tentative pirouette as of a ballerina waiting in the wings and slid smoothly downwards once more. The men sweated at the teak joist. Mrs Kittery, her flawless figure everywhere touched to an innocent and plastic voluptuousness by the sun, strenuously helped. It did not look like being an easy job.

  “‘Cerberus muriaticus,’” read Miss Curricle, “‘is uniquely distinguished by the possession of three distinct and separate digestive systems, with the full complement of orifices, tubes and accessory organs which this remarkable organisation entails. When all three stomachs are distended – commonly by the intake of the common sea-bun or sea-kidney – the creature presents a grotesquely bulbous appearance and seems to suffer acute discomfort not unsuggestive of the purely human ailment of mal de mer. The eye has a more than fish-like glaze, movement is hindered by violent spasms of colic, a suggestion of rictus attends the gape of the jaw.’”

  Mrs Kittery, whose eye had been wandering to the glacé pineapple, turned rather abruptly again to the mast. A complete absence of tools and the frangibility of the surfaces on which they were supported made progress slow: nevertheless it seemed likely that a mast, sufficient to support a sail filled with a light breeze, could be got up. The practical gain, Appleby reflected as he worked, would be of the slightest. Nothing could make their fantastic raft into a vessel capable of directing itself across the Straits of Dover, let alone to any goal amid this infinity of water. But the psychological use of being a little under way might be considerable; the shadow of navigation would be better than mere drift. Particularly at night, when the mind could give itself to the notion of steering by the stars.

  Glover slapped the mast noisily, glanced warily at Miss Curricle – she was continuing to maintain the spirits of the company after her own fashion – and spoke in a low voice. “Appleby – what d’you think?”

  “If the ocean stays like this we’re all right for several days. Then a week’s coma. With luck one of us might stay intermittently conscious for a fortnight. Which wouldn’t be bad.”

  “‘Distinct from this,’” announced Miss Curricle, “‘is cerberus muriaticus muricatus. Here each lower jaw carries a sharp spear or prickle, so that the general appearance is somewhat suggestive of a three-headed submarine unicorn.’”

  “Not bad?” said Glover – and stared at Appleby hard but not disapprovingly.

  “‘When hunting in shoals through the eerie jungle of the ocean-bed this species gives a striking impression of combined ferocity and efficiency. A co-operative method has been evolved. Each individual impales three or more sea-buns on his prickle and then proffers the refection thus secured to its nearest companion.’”

  “Not bad in that it does give us an outside chance. On a shipping-route – even in the Pacific – fourteen days is something. And of course there may be a search; it depends on what the wireless people managed.” Appleby’s glance went grimly to the empty sea.

  “‘The reproductive mechanisms of these creatures,’” read Miss Curricle unflinchingly, “‘are curious in an extreme.’”

  Mrs Kittery momentarily suspended her labours, Mr Hoppo gave the impression of a man who is absorbedly humming a little tune in his head. Unumunu, who had taken off his shirt as he worked, was ebony and immobile by what was to be the prow. And to the west the sun sank towards the Philippine Basin. They were alone with themselves and the nether world conjured about them by Miss Curricle. Barren and eternally striving, its every rising and withdrawing surface netted and embossed with veins, flecked and fretted with foam, the ocean possessed them. And they longed for the seaside, the approximate human thing, longed for the babble from the beach, the floating peel, the impatient hoot at the pier, the waddle or swoop of gulls. But about them there was only the momentary life of flying fish, fluid bodies half dissolved in light and, beyond, the occasional irresponsible roll of dolphins.

  Cerberus muriaticus was disposed of – the data given, the senses even. The mast was up and a sail rigged; it was possible to discern that the café moved other than at the will of the waters. Mr Hoppo talked of islands, of flying-boats, of pearl-luggers, of benevolent natives in ocean-going canoes. There were manoeuvres to provide a decent segregation of the sexes; there was an apportioning of stores and a meal which Mrs Kittery, eating ice cream and wafers, cheerfully called tea. The path to the sun was a foreshortened trail of fire; the orb reddened, grew, touched the horizon, and incontinently tumbled out of view in a flash of green light. Miss Curricle, providently scavenging crumbs, remarked that with one stride came the dark.

  Features faded; only forms remained; there was a brief loosening of tongues. “We ought to have Mr Hoppo’s hippo here,” said Mrs Kittery, with whom a joke did not readily lose its first freshness. “It would make it just like the Ark. Mr Hoppo, do you believe in the Ark – or is it just a story?”

  Miss Curricle coughed warningly, as if she felt their situation peculiarly unsuitable to theological discussion. But Mr Hoppo was not displeased. “I certainly believe in the historical authenticity of Noah’s Flood. But it is a story too, having been contrived by Providence with an allegorical intention.”

  “It seems a little hard on the poor sinners,” said Unumunu; “subj
ecting them for the purposes of allegorical statement to the horrors of a universal deluge. But on the historical fact I agree. Almost every folk-lore contains reference to a flood. The melting of a polar ice-cap may have had something to do with it.”

  Mr Hoppo could be seen to sit up, rather like a don stirred from somnolence by an unexpectedly intelligent undergraduate. “That the immediate mechanisms involved,” he said carefully, “should be explicable in what are commonly called natural or scientific terms is scarcely an argument–”

  “Miss Curricle,” interrupted Mrs Kittery, for whom abstract discussion had no appeal, “shall be Noah’s wife. And – and Sir Ponto is Ham.”

  “Mrs Noah if you please,” said Miss Curricle, somewhat heavily unbending. “If we are really like the Ark – and we could scarcely be less like a ship – it may be a good omen that we shall find an Ararat. And now I think that we had better go to bed.” She peered about her. “Or perhaps it is necessary to use a genteelism and suggest that we retire.”

  Mr Hoppo rummaged in the darkness. “How fortunate that there are several rugs! I am reminded less of the Ark than of the Swiss Family Robinson. You remember how everything necessary turned up.”

  “It is overdone.” Miss Curricle was decisive. “Too many visits to the wreck. I prefer Coral Island.”

  “For that matter,” said Glover, “I don’t think you can beat Robinson Crusoe. So dashed convincing…’stonishing book.”

  “My people have many stories of the finding of islands,” said Unumunu, and his voice sounded deeper with the night. “They are found after many suns, some of them – and many moons. Some are not found at all, and they are the fortunate islands – the islands of the blessed. And that is another universal legend.” He sighed. “Known, Mrs Kittery, whether where Japhet dwells, or Cham, or Sem.”

  “Once I saw a serial” – Mrs Kittery’s voice was a shade uncertain in the darkness – “and some people were wrecked and found an island…”

  They were asleep. Strangely quickly – except Appleby, who took first watch – they were asleep in corners of their hazardous craft. The stars blazed, an electric multitudinous fire, and Orion somersaulted towards the horizon. Cork-like the café rose and fell to the slither of the ocean. Of sound there was only a lapping; the ear, cheated and uneasy, sought the quiver, the rhythmic thud and swish of a liner’s progress, the high uncanny whistle that comes into a ship’s rigging below the line. They were running before a faint westerly, and conceivably making over a knot; in nine months, Appleby reflected, they might reach Peru. And learn what was left of the world…