No Man's Island Part 15

"Is the tower used for anything now?" Warrender asked the Swiss.

"Ze tower? No, it is ruin, fall to pieces," replied the man.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'ZE TOWER? NO, IT IS RUIN, FALL TO PIECES.'"]

"I say, we _are_ a couple of lunatics!" cried Armstrong. "We've left the dinghy at the ferry. What's the good of the short cut? Pratt can't work the motor."

"Hang it! I'd clean forgotten."

"Zen ve go back?" said the guide, eagerly. He had come to the end of the open grounds; the rest of the way lay through a wilderness of shrubs that promised laborious walking.

"No, I'm hanged if we do," said Warrender. "Now we've come so far we'll not go back."

"Zen how you cross ze river?"

"Swim it. You needn't come. We'll forge straight ahead. Thanks."

He tipped the man, and plunged with Armstrong into the thicket. Ten minutes' battling with the intricately woven ma.s.s of greenery brought them to the brink of the stream almost exactly opposite to their camping-place. They stripped, bundled their clothes upon their heads, and made short work of the thirty-foot channel.

"My aunt! In native garb!" cried Pratt, as they walked up still unclothed. "'Here be we poor mariners.' s.h.i.+pwrecked? Lost the dinghy?"

"No, only our tempers," replied Armstrong. "The dinghy's still at the ferry."

"I say, my uncle hasn't got back, has he?" asked Pratt.

"No. Why?"

"I thought perhaps you had met him, and got a taste of _his_ temper, that's all. 'Tell me not in mournful numbers'--but tell me anyhow you like the cause of this Ulyssean exhibition."

Warrender began the narrative as he towelled himself, continued it through his dressing, and concluded it when he had dropped into his chair by Pratt's side. Pratt listened with ever-growing merriment.

"You priceless old fatheads!" he exclaimed. "When the beggar chucked Latin at you why didn't you pelt him with Greek, Phil?--or with sines and hypotenuses, and all that, Jack? Don't you remember how some Cambridge josser floored a heathen bargee by calling him an isosceles triangle? I wish I'd gone."

"I wish you had!" echoed Warrender. "But when a fellow's so dashed polite----"

"Polite! I tell you what it is: you're both too serious for this flighty world. When you consider that it's gyrating at the rate of I don't know how many thousand miles a minute, it's unnatural, positively indecent, for any one to be so stuggy. The art of life is to effervesce. But, you know, the important feature of your morning's entertainment seems not to have sufficiently impressed you."

"What's that?" asked Armstrong.

"Rod's wife. _Cherchez la femme_! You oughtn't to have come away without having had a word with her."

"How on earth could we?" said Warrender. "We weren't asked into the house, and if we had been----"

"My dear chap, if a fair lady beckoned to me out of her cas.e.m.e.nt window I'd find some means of receiving her behests. Rod's wife, _nee_ Molly Rogers, didn't make signs to you for nothing, and I foresee that I shall have to turn our skipping-rope into a rope ladder, and----"

"Oh, don't go on ga.s.sing," Armstrong interposed, irascibly. "Can't you be serious?"

"Solemnity itself. We've got to fetch that dinghy. I want to go to the post office. Very well, after lunch Phil shall run me up in the motorboat. I'll have a word with Rogers on the way, and I bet my boots I won't come back without some little addition to our dossier."

Pratt's programme was carried out. Warrender and he found Joe Rogers pulling spring onions in his garden behind the inn. The man had placed his wig on a pea-stick, and his bald pate glowed in the sunlight like a pink turnip.

"Good-afternoon, Joe," said Pratt, genially. "I wonder how it is that you sailormen so often take to gardening when your sea days are over?"

"I can't tell 'ee, sir, 'cept it be as we loves the look o' vegetables, being without 'em so long at a time. The old woman do say it keeps me out o' mischief."

"Now, Rogers," called his better half from an upper window, "put on your hair this minute. Drat the man! Do 'ee want to catch your death of sunstroke?"

Rogers gave a sly look at his visitors as he donned his wig.

"It do make my skull itch terrible," he said. "But she's a good woman."

"I jolly well hope I shall be looked after as well when my time comes,"

said Pratt. "But I'm not thinking of matrimony yet. What age did you marry at, Joe?"

"Thirty-one, just the same age as my sister Molly, but not in such a hurry. My missus took a deal o' courting; 'twas five years' hard labour; whereas Molly give in in less than a month."

"He came, he saw--he conquered. Must be something fascinating about him. Has she lost her cold, by the way? My friends happened to see her this morning."

"Well now, if that ain't too bad. She haven't been nigh me for a good fortnight, and she didn't ought to go about the village without looking in."

"They saw her at the house. She seemed to be catching flies or something at the window. I gather you don't like her husband."

"I've nothing against him, 'cept his name and furren nature. My missus told her she was cutting a rod for her own back."

"Surely he doesn't beat her?"

"That wasn't her meaning. Rod's his name, and the missus do have a way of taking up a word and twisting of it about, you may say. 'A rod in pickle,' says she. 'Tis just a clappering tongue; there's no sense in it. But it do seem as Molly have turned her back on all her old friends. 'Tis like this: they furriners bain't favourites in the parish, and Molly sticks to her husband, as 'tis her duty. That's what I make of it."

"Well, I dare say she chose the pick of the bunch. How many are there of them, by the bye?"

"Four, leaving out the secretary. They don't go about in the village much. None of 'em comes here 'cept that feller you saw t'other day, and he don't come often. _I_ don't get no good of 'em. 'Twas different in the old days."

"Things will take a turn," said Pratt, consolingly. "When my--when Mr.

Pratt returns I dare say he'll quarrel with the foreigners, and get English servants again."

"And be ye all right on the island, sir?"

"Having a ripping time. We're always on the look-out for the ghost, but he seems rather shy. I can sympathise with him, being so bashful myself."

"You do seem to have a bit of a b.u.mp one side of the head, sir. No inseck have been poisoning 'ee, I hope."

"No. Insects love me too well to disfigure me. I'm inclined to think it was a worm, or something like a leech, perhaps. It's a trifle; a molehill, not a mountain. To-morrow both sides will be equal, and the angles subtended at the base as right as ever. Good-bye; keep your hair on."

"Well, old man, we've spent a profitable quarter of an hour," said Pratt, as he went on with Warrender to the village. "The number of Gradoff s staff is confirmed; therefore the chap I collared is not one of them. As to Rod's wife, there's no mystery about her. She's disgusted, as any sensible person would be, at the petty narrow-mindedness of the natives who dislike her husband simply because he's of another breed, and so she cuts 'em dead."

"But what did her movements at the window mean?" asked Warrender. "It certainly looked as if she wanted help or something."

"Nothing of the sort, depend upon it. She was waving you off; she's as careful of Rod as Rogers's missus is of him; she was afraid Armstrong would go for Rod as he went for the Swede. I'm always ready to own up when I'm wrong. My old theories won't hold water. I think I'll give up detecting and go in for the Bar. You only have to stick to your brief; needn't have an idea of your own."