Grand Canary Read Free

‘ Back and ready to begin again.’ He smiled his dry, reassuring smile; then the door closed behind him and he was gone.
    Back – ready to begin again? Sitting there alone as Ismay had left him, he had the rushing conviction that he would never begin again. But what did it matter, anyway? That was all past, finished, done with; and in the meantime he wanted a drink, wanted it so badly he felt the moisture run into his mouth in reflex to the thought. Strange how alcohol had helped him. It was a drug, and as such he recognised it – a useful drug which he had applied deliberately to his own condition, blunting the edge of his suffering, dulling the quivering agony of his mind. Dispassionately he studied the question. He was no drunkard. He was a scientist, bound to no banal moral code, admitting no virtue but truth – that truth which he had always sought – impervious to the stupid, the obvious, and the orthodox, demanding the freedom to arrange his destiny according to his will. It was a lucid thought and not without a certain bitter comfort.
    He remained quite still, craving to drink, feeling the fine tremor of his fingers run into his arms in spasms of nervous irritation. But oddly, with a fierce and introverted grimness, he withheld the moment of his deliverance. He would drink when the ship got under way, but not before. And so he sat waiting; waiting for the ship’s departure.

Chapter Two
    The ship, too, seemed waiting. In the waist, the cargo hatches lay secured, tarpaulined and in sea shape. Beyond, at the donkey engine, two men in blue jerseys stood alert, shrouded by a coil of hissing steam. In the bows the boatswain fingered his whistle, and by the gangway Hamble, the purser, hung about, dusting the lapels of his monkey-jacket, caressing his small moustache, fiddling at his stringy black tie, all with a sort of nervous anticipation.
    The tender had long ago stood off. On the bridge deck, gazing intently towards the quay, there was firmly planted a short man in uniform who now, without moving his head, hailed the bridge. At once the siren sounded – a long and mournful note, repeated and again repeated. At the same second a swift moving shape darted from the dull background of the docks towards the ship. On it came, an open motor-launch, impelled to speed by the siren’s troubled moaning, threshing a curving wake with every indication of despatch. In three minutes it bumped alongside.
    Beyond the rich baggage which it contained and the waterman – plainly distressed to be involved in the supreme disaster of a ship’s delay – the launch held three passengers.
    And now they came on board.
    Daines-Dibdin, a long, rangy, senile gentleman with a monocle embedded in his eye, came first. He was a reddish, withered gentleman, but he was, in his preserved way, utterly immaculate and well bred. He stood, at a glance, for the correct thing, and there was about him a perennial aspect and a certain doltish inevitability as though one day he might use Bond Street as his highway and the next, with a fresh shave and serene stupidity, the middle of the Sahara.
    Breathing heavily, he reached the deck and turned to assist the others – a woman and a girl – now clambering up the gangway. At that moment Harvey, chafing at the delay, flung open his cabin door. His brooding eye, arrested suddenly, fastened on the scene of the arrival: the formal reception, Hamble’s deference, the rapid attention to the baggage, the agitated scurrying of the stewardess, the unusual stir created. With cold detachment he noticed these evidences of social consequence, and a moment later, as the two women advanced along the deck, he inspected them stonily.
    The elder was tall, with a full and elegant figure, a languid air, and a manner so completely assured it aroused unreasonably a sort of irritation. Perhaps it was Elissa Baynham’s manner which had irritated two husbands through the divorce