Appleby on Ararat Read Free Page A

– “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,”