"Well, personally it would give me the willies," said Diane. "But it's all according, I suppose." She prepared to take her leave. "See you at dinner."
"Yes."
"Think of that poor old man," said Diane, "chucked overboard, bobbing about like a cork in a kettle. There ought to be a law against it."
3
Running down to Rio, the Alcestis regained her spirits. If Simms had been known to anyone on board, they might have mourned him longer; but he had lived and died anonymously, as far as the ship was concerned, and he passed out of mind almost as swiftly as he had quitted the after-deck on his last journey. It was not a callous reaction; the worst it contained was an element of self-delusion, designed to make those who were left behind feel happy and confident again. Of course Simms had died—or at least, passed over— but he was so shadowy a figure that his passing didn't really count. He had been a name on a list, and now the list was altered; but everyone else that one knew still figured on it, and that was the way it was going to stay.
People talked about him, avidly enough, for the space of two days; his burial—no, his leave-taking—had been original, even bizarre. Then they only remembered him accidentally, when the nurse laughed a little too loudly at the officers' table; and then he was forgotten.
The weather helped this process, and, more than the weather, their ports of call. They were coasting down from the mouth of the Amazon to Rio de Janeiro, touching at all the towns on the Brazilian sea-board where the company had any sort of tourist connexions. Brazil was much written up in the ship's daily bulletins as a land of mystery, scarcely explored, hardly penetrable at all save by intrepid voyagers such as those carried in the Alcestis. Romantic names and words constantly recurred—Matto Grosso, alligators, gauchos, jungle-orchids, cruzeiros, Amer-Indians, piranhas, Dom Pedro II. Brazil was terra incognita; it was larger than the United States. . . .
As they worked their way down the coast, little of thismystique actually confronted them: the successive calls at such places as Belem, Fortalez, Recife, and Salvador were like their calls anywhere else— they anchored off the coast or came alongside, they went ashore, drove up mountains, rode horses along bridle trails, looked at monasteries, wandered round museums, attended race-tracks, explored slums, took photographs, sampled the local food, spat out the local drinks, talked, quarrelled, got drunk, pushed aside the beggars, and went thankfully back to civilization again, laden with souvenirs made of rare, unwrought silver.
But the places were amusing enough, the people could safely be labelled quaint, or colourful, or different; and always, present in all their minds, there was this idea of Brazil—part of an untamed continent, full of silences and this hiss of poisoned blow-pipes,bigger than the United States, and of course all matted jungle except for this tiny coastal strip. Each time they went ashore it was as if they were winning, afresh, a toe-hold on a savage hinterland. This extraordinary illusion did no one any harm, and made very real the idea that a cruise in the Alcestis was a lifetime adventure.
For the Professor, this was no longer quite true. Being underemployed, he was beginning to be bored; the trips ashore tired him, and he had little to do except doze in his chair on the sun-deck, and make for the Tapestry Bar as soon as it opened. His book languished, though he loved it as dearly as ever, and sometimes, if he could assemble an audience—one listener was an audience—he read selected sections of it aloud.
On such occasions his voice took on a fine sonorous timbre, and his white mane and proud old face gave him new authority. But he soon tired of this, too; reading was thirsty work, he would say, after ten or fifteen minutes; he did not want to bore anyone—perhaps a little refreshment. . . . Refreshment marked the end of every day; he would sit in the bar, drinking at a steady rate, delivering long philosophical monologues on classical education, and public morality, and the indiscipline of the young, to whoever would listen to him; until gradually he became fuddled, and his face, paper-frail, lost its fine distinction and collapsed into dribbling foolishness, and he stumbled off to bed.
Edgar would look after him, shaking his head. "He'll be the next to go, if he don't watch out," he would say. "Stands to reason. Think of a liver that's been going full-ahead for seventy years. No resilience."
Louis, lapped in luxury, was also cushioned in servitude; his S500 a week for round-the-clock attendance was becoming harder and harder to earn.
It was not that Belle Consolini was overdoing the obvious demands: she had never done so, and she was not going to start now. She had made this clear from the beginning. "It's a matter of mood," she told Louis."My mood. I'll tell you when I want it, and you'd better be on deck when I do. But we're not out to break any records. That's for kids. I'm forty-four, and I like being forty-four, and I'm going to act forty-four. I'm paying for your company, not just your-" She had a colourful way of expressing herself which Louis, a child of the gutter himself, often found shocking. "I should be very surprised if it's more than once or twice a week," she elaborated, "but I want to see more of you than that. For instance, when we get to Rio—"
Thus she made plans, disposing of his time as if she were paying him by the hour; almost she drew up a daily schedule, setting out where he was to be and what he was to be doing, from breakfast-time to midnight and beyond. If she wanted someone to talk to while she was making up for dinner, he was to be there, sitting in a chair near her dressing-table; if she wanted a handkerchief or a scarf or a magazine, he went to fetch it, and he had to come back straight away. When she felt too lazy to go ashore and buy something, he trotted off to execute the commission; when she gave a small party for some of the officers and a dozen of her fellow-passengers, he wrote out the invitations, and saw that they were delivered, and subsequently helped with the drinks, passed the salted almonds, fetched the chairs, lit the cigarettes. Afterwards he had to listen to the post-mortem; and if she were "in the mood", he had to press that button also.
All he was excused, due to circumstances beyond her control, was the washing-up.
She had taken to calling him Scapelli; it had a finger-snapping sound which seemed to determine his status more pointedly than anything else. "Good morning, Scapelli," was certainly adequate for a head-waiter or even a secretary; but for an ardent lover it seemed less than warm, less than encouraging. He was a lazy young man, who would never have quarrelled with $500 a week for performing almost any service; but when the service was of this sort— constant, humble, and emasculate—then even he, as the mileage of subservience piled up, felt a surge of impatient manhood.
Above all, there was, ever-present, Mr. Consolini, that knowing paragon who had done everything and, it seemed, everybody. She referred to him very regularly indeed, not as someone whom she mourned—they had been married for fifteen years, and for the last ten he had been spectacularly inattentive—but as a man whom nothing ever took by surprise because nothing was new. He had travelled five times round the world, he had been in jail ("He was framed," said Mrs. Consolini, with a certain wistful admiration for some unnamed third party), he had bought and sold every single commodity from black pepper to under-age female companionship. Whenever Louis asked a question, Mr. Consolini had known the answer, and his widow, scornful or complacent, produced it now. Sometimes it was less than crystal-clear. Once he had asked her if she were fond of snails. "Good heavens, no!" she answered, almost shuddering. "My husband once told me what goes on in there."