Roden's Corner Part 5

"Yes, I think she is pretty."

"I am glad of that. I like girls to be pretty. It makes their lives so much more interesting--to the onlooker, _bien entendu_, but not to themselves. The happiest women I have known have been the plain ones.

But perhaps your sister will be pretty and happy too. That would be so nice, and so very rare, Mr. Roden. I shall look forward to making her acquaintance. I live in The Hague, you know. I have a house in Park Straat, and I am only at this hotel while the painters are in possession. You will allow me to call on your sister when she joins you?"

"We shall be most gratified," said Roden.

Mrs. Vansittart had risen with a little glance at the clock, and her companion rose also. "I am greatly interested in your scheme," she said. "Much more than I can tell you. It is so refres.h.i.+ng to find charity in such close connection with practical common sense. I think you are doing a great work, Mr. Roden."

"I do what I can," he replied, with a bow.

"And Mr. Von Holzen," inquired Mrs. Vansittart, stopping for a moment as she moved towards the doorway, which is large and hung with curtains--"does Mr. Von Holzen work from purely philanthropic motives also?"

"Well--yes, I think so. Though, of course, he, like myself, will be paid a salary. Perhaps, however, he is more interested in malgamite from a scientific point of view."

"Ah, yes, from a scientific point of view, of course. Good night, Mr.

Roden."

And she left him.

CHAPTER V.

OUT OF EGYPT.

"Un esclave est moins celui qu'on vend que celui qui se donne"

A sea fog was blowing across the smooth surface of the Maas where that river is broad and shallow, and a steamer anch.o.r.ed in the channel, grim and motionless, gave forth a grunt of warning from time to time, while a boy with mittened hands rang the bell hung high on the forecastle with a dull monotony. The wind blowing from the south-east drove before it the endless fog which hummed through the rigging, and hung there in little icicles that pointed to leeward. On the bridge of the steamer, looking like a huge woollen barrel surmounted by a comforter and a cap with ear-flaps, the Dutch pilot stood philosophically at his post. Near him the captain, mindful of the company's time-tables, walked with a quick, impatient step. The fog was blowing past at the rate of four or five miles an hour, but the supply of it, emanating from the low lands bordering the Scheldt, seemed to be inexhaustible. This fog, indeed, blows across Holland nearly the whole winter.

The steamer's deck was covered with ice, over which sand had been strewn. The pa.s.sengers were below in the warm saloon. Only the blue-faced boy at the bell on the forecastle was on the main-deck. At times one of the watch hurried from the galley to the forecastle with a pannikin of steaming coffee. The vessel had been anch.o.r.ed since daybreak and the sound of other bells and other whistles far and near told that she was not alone in these waters. The distant boom of a steamer creeping cautiously down from Rotterdam seemed to promise that farther inland the fog was thinner. A silence, broken only by the whisper of the wind through the rigging, reigned over all, so that men listened with antic.i.p.ations of relief for the sound of answering bells.

The sky at length grew a little lighter, and presently gaps made their appearance in the fog, allowing peeps over the green and still water.

The captain and the pilot exchanged a few words--the very shortest of consultations. They had been on the bridge together all night, and had said all that there was to be said about wind and weather. The captain gave a sharp order in his gruff voice, and, as if by magic, the watch on deck appeared from all sides. The chief officer emerged from his cabin beneath the wheel-house, and went forward into the fog, turning up his collar. Presently the jerk and clink of the steam-winch told that the anchor was being got home. The fog had been humoured for six hours, and the time had now come to move on through thick or thin. What should Berlin, Petersburg, Vienna, know of a fog on the Maas? And there were mails and pa.s.sengers on board this steamer. The clink of the winch brought one of these on deck. Within the high collar of his fur coat, beneath the brim of a felt hat pulled well down, the keen; fair face of Mr. Anthony Cornish came peering up the gangway to the upper bridge. He exchanged a nod with the captain and the pilot; for with these he had already been in conversation at the breakfast-table. He took his station on the bridge behind them, with his hands deep in the pockets of his loose coat, a cigarette between his lips. A shout from the forecastle soon intimated that the anchor was up, and the captain gave the order to the boy at the engine-room telegraph. Through the fog the forms of the three men on the look-out on the forecastle were dimly discernible. The great steamer crept cautiously forward into the fog.

The second mate, with his hand on the whistle-line, blared out his warning note every half-minute. A dim shadow loomed up on the port-side, which presently took the form of a great steamer at anchor, and was left behind with a ringing bell and a booming whistle. Another shadow turned out to be a pilot-cutter, and the Dutch pilot exchanged a shouted consultation with an invisible person whom he called "Thou,"

and who replied to the imperfectly heard questions with the words, "South East." This shadow also was left behind, faintly calling, "South East," "South East."

"It is a white buoy that I seek," said the pilot, turning to those on the bridge behind him, his jolly red face puckered with anxiety. And quite suddenly the second officer, a bright-red Scotchman with little blue eyes like tempered gimlets, threw out a red hand and pointing finger.

"There she rides," he said. "There she rides; staar boarrrd your h.e.l.lum!"

And a full thirty seconds elapsed before any other eyes could pierce that gloom and perceive a great white buoy bowing solemnly towards the steamer like a courtier bidding a sovereign welcome. One voice had seemed to be gradually dominating the din of the many warning whistles that sounded ahead, astern, and all around the steamer. This voice, like that of a strong man knowing his own mind in an a.s.sembly of excited and unstable counsellors, had long been raised with a persistence which at last seemed to command all others, and the steamer moved steadily towards it; for it was the siren fog-horn at the pier-head. At one moment it seemed to be quite near, and at the next far away; for the ears, unaided by the eyes, can but imperfectly focus sound or measure its distance.

"At last!" said the captain, suddenly, the anxiety wiped away from his face as if by magic. "At last, I hear the cranes aworking on the quay."

The purser had come to the bridge, and now approached Cornish.

"Are you going to land them at the Hook or take them on to Rotterdam, sir?" he asked.

"Oh, land 'em at the Hook," replied Cornish, readily. "Have you fed them?"

"Yes, sir. They have had their breakfast--such as it is. Poor eaters I call them, sir."

"Yes." said Cornish, turning and looking at his burly interlocutor.

"Yes, I do not suppose they eat much."

The purser shrugged his shoulders, and turned his attention to other affairs, thoughtfully. The little, beacon at the head of the pier had suddenly loomed out of the fog not fifty yards away--a very needle in a pottle of hay, which the cunning of the pilot had found.

"Who are they, at any rate--these hundred and twenty ghosts of men?"

asked the sailor, abruptly.

"They are malgamite workers," answered Cornish, cheerily. "And I am going to make men of them--not ghosts."

The purser looked at him, laughed in rather a puzzled way, and quitted the bridge. Cornish remained there, taking a quick, intelligent interest in the manoeuvres by which the great steamer was being brought alongside the quay. He seemed to have already forgotten the hundred and twenty men in the second-cla.s.s cabin. His touch was indeed hopelessly light. He understood how it was that the steamer was made to obey, but he could not himself have brought her alongside. Cornish was a true son of a generation which understands much of many things, but not quite sufficient of any one.

He stood at the upper end of the gangway as the malgamite workers filed off--a sorry crew, narrow-chested, hollow-eyed, with that half-hopeless, half-reckless air that tells of a close familiarity with disease and death. He nodded to them airily as they pa.s.sed him. Some of them took the trouble to answer his salutation, others seemed indifferent. A few glanced at him with a sort of dull wonder. And indeed this man was not of the material of which great philanthropists are made. He was cheerful and heedless, shallow and superficial.

"Get 'em into the train," he said to an official at his side; and then, seeing that he had not been understood, gave the order glibly enough in another language.

The ill-clad travellers shuffled up the gangway and through the custom-house. Few seemed to take an interest in their surroundings.

They exchanged no comments, but walked side by side in silence--dumb and driven animals. Some of them bore signs of disease. A few stumbled as they went. One or two were half blind, with groping hands. That they were of different nationalities was plain enough. Here a Jew from Vienna, with the fear of the Judenhetze in his eyes, followed on the heels of a tow-headed giant from Stockholm. A cunning c.o.c.kney touched his hat as he pa.s.sed, and rather ostentatiously turned to help a white-haired little Italian over the inequalities of the gangway. One thing only they had in common--their deadly industry. One shadow lay over them all--the shadow of death. A momentary gravity pa.s.sed across Cornish's face. These men were as far removed from him as the crawling beetle is from the b.u.t.terfly. Who shall say, however, that the b.u.t.terfly sees nothing but the flowers?

As they pa.s.sed him, some of them edged away with a dull humility for fear their poor garments should touch his fur coat. One, carrying a bird-cage, half paused, with a sort of pride, that Cornish might obtain a fuller view of a depressed canary. The malgamite workers of this winter's morning on the pier of Hoek were not the interesting industrials of Lady Ferriby's drawing-room. There their lives had been spoken of as short and merry. Here the merriment was scarcely perceptible. The mystery of the dangerous industries is one of those mysteries of human nature which cannot be explained by even the youngest of novelists. That dangerous industries exist we all know and deplore. That the supply of men and women ready to take employment in such industries is practically inexhaustible is a fact worth at least a moment's attention.

Cornish made the necessary arrangements with the railway officials, and carefully counted his charges, who were already seated in the carriages reserved for them. He must at all events be allowed the virtues of a generation which is eminently practical and capable of overcoming the small difficulties of everyday life. He was quick to decide and prompt to act.

Then he seated himself in a carriage alone, with a sigh of relief at the thought that in a few days he would be back in London. His responsibility ended at The Hague, where he was to hand over the malgamite workers to the care of Roden and Von Holzen. They were rather a depressing set of men, and Holland, as seen from the carriage window--a snow-clad plain intersected by frozen ditches and ca.n.a.ls--was no more enlivening. The temperature was deadly cold; the dull houses were rime-covered and forbidding. The malgamite makers had been gathered together from all parts of the world in a home specially organized for them in London. A second detachment was awaiting their orders at Hamburg. But the princ.i.p.al workers were these now placed under Cornish's care.

During the days of their arrival, when they had to be met and housed and cared for, the visionary part of this great scheme had slowly faded before a somewhat grim reality. Joan Ferriby had found the malgamite workers less picturesque than she had antic.i.p.ated.

"If they only washed," she had confided to Major White, "I am sure they would be easier to deal with." And after talking French very vivaciously and boldly with a man from Lyons, she hurried back to the West End, and to the numerous engagements which naturally take up much of one's time when Lent is approaching, and dilatory hospitality is stirred up by the startling collapse of the Epiphany Sundays.

Here, however, were the malgamite workers and they had to be dealt with. It was not quite what many had antic.i.p.ated, perhaps, and Cornish was looking forward with undisguised pleasure to the moment when he could rid himself of these persons whom Joan had gaily designated as "rather gruesome," and whom he frankly recognized as sordid and uninteresting. He did not even look, as Joan had looked, to the wives and children who were to follow as likely to prove more picturesque and engaging.

The train made its way cautiously over the fog-ridden plain, and Cornish s.h.i.+vered as he looked out of the window. "Schiedam," the porters called. This, Schiedam? A mere village, and yet the name was so familiar. The world seemed suddenly to have grown small and sordid. A few other stations with historic names, and then The Hague.

Cornish quitted his carriage, and found himself shaking hands with Roden, who was awaiting him on the platform, clad in a heavy fur coat.

Roden looked clever and capable--cleverer and more capable than Cornish had even suspected--and the organization seemed perfect. The reserved carriages had been in readiness at the Hook. The officials were prepared.

"I have omnibuses and carts for them and their luggage," were the first words that Roden spoke.

Cornish instinctively placed himself under Roden's orders. The man had risen immensely in his estimation since the arrival in London of the first malgamite maker. The grim reality of the one had enhanced the importance of the other. Cornish had been engaged in so many charities _pour rire_ that the seriousness of this undertaking was apt to exaggerate itself in his mind--if, indeed, the seriousness of anything dwelt there at all.

"I counted them all over at the Hook," he said. "One hundred and twenty--pretty average scoundrels."

"Yes; they are not much to look at," answered Roden.