CHAPTER XXI

THE FEELING ON THE COAST

"Well, Carter-me-lad," said Captain Image, coming into the room, "they tell me you're the most unpopular man in Liverpool. They want to give you dinners, and put your photo in the papers, and hear you make a speech, and you won't have anything to do with anybody. What's broke? Tin troubling you?"

"Oh! tin's all right. But I've got a constitutional dislike to marching along at the tail of a brass band, that's all. Besides I feel an awful humbug when all these silly stay-at-home people insist on believing that the one and only reason I went up country was to chop down old Kallee's private crucifixion tree. Have a cigar?"

"Not me in here, me lad. I came home from the Islands with the old _M'poso_ full of passengers, and I've smoked myself half sick on cigars. I'll suck at a pipe. By the way, I've got a message for you from Kallee. The old sinner came on board himself when we were lying off Edmondson's factory trying to get your ore, and nearly drank the ship dry before I could get quit of him. Owe-it Slade's been palming off I.O.U.'s on him. He'd got quite a sheaf of them. He says when you marry Laura he'll give them to you as a wedding present, or words to that effect. But in the meanwhile if he can catch Slade he's just going to chop his head off to prevent him putting any more paper into circulation."

"Well?"

"Well, you see, me lad, Slade owes our fo'c'sle shop a matter of four pounds odd which we can't collect, and he's got a Holland gun of mine that I shouldn't really like to lose. Besides, come to thinking of it, I suppose Laura's fond of him anyway. Couldn't you do something for him?"

Carter stared. "Has he left O'Neill and Craven's, then?"

Captain Image stopped down the tobacco in his pipe with a horny forefinger. "Why, no, and you'll have to pay to get him away."

"But what mortal use is he to me?"

Captain Image's pipe worked hard and he spoke in jerks. "Rubber palaver. Owe-it Slade's the smartest man at dem rubber palaver on the Coast."

"Pooh! That slackster!"

"That's where you're making the usual mistake. Slade's got his faults. He wastes his money, he never pays his bills, he sponges for all eternity, and he makes out he was born lazy. But don't you believe him. Who got Miss Kate all these rubber properties that she's floated off into such whacking big companies?"

"Miss Kate O'Neill."

"No more than you did, me lad. It was just Owe-it Slade. And to think," Captain Image added with a sigh, "I always put that man down as a borrowing waster, and never even hustled him to collect cargo for me. Why, if I'd known then what I know now, I could have bought rubber lands through him, for a half surf boat full of gin, that I might have sold to a company myself, and dined off turkey in my own house ashore every day for all the rest of my natural life. Why, my Christian Aunt! I might even have married, if I'd worked him properly."

Captain Image dabbed with his forefinger on Carter's coat sleeve and left a print of tobacco ash. "You buy up Owe-it Slade, me lad, and not only is your fortune made, but--well," he added rather lamely, "you buy him up and just remember I told you to."

"But--what were you going to say?"

"Well," said Image desperately, "I didn't intend to tell you, but all up and down the Coast, and in the hotels in Las Palmas, and even in the bars and offices here, the boys don't like the way Miss Kate is playing it on you. It's all right for a girl to take to business, if she's built that way, but she ought to play the game. Of course the general idea is, me lad, that you and she started sweet-hearting and had a turn-up, but of course I'm in the know, and I've called 'em dam' liars every time they've started that tale, and told 'em about Laura and how you were fixed up long before Miss Kate came down onto the Coast. Why, Carter-me-lad, I've backed up my words with bets to that extent that if you were to marry the lady now by any kind of accident, I should stand to lose what with one fiver and another, a matter of two hundred and fifty pounds."

Carter laughed. "That puts it finally out of the region of possibility, doesn't it? I can't let you lose a pile like that. But all the same I'm not going to interfere with Miss O'Neill. If Slade's useful to her, let her keep him. I'm much obliged to a lot of officious idiots for sympathizing with me, but really they're moving on a lot too fast. It will be quite time for other people to be sorry for me when I start in to be sorry for myself. Besides, I thought you, at any rate, were a strong admirer of Miss O'Neill's?"

"I am," said Captain Image patiently. He always flattered himself that he left the more eloquent parts of his speech at Sierra Leone on each trip north, and picked them up again there next voyage for vigorous use on the Coast. It was his pride that he conformed most suitably to Liverpool's sedate atmosphere. "I admire Miss Kate as a lady more than anyone I know, and if she were only twenty years older, and I could afford it, I wouldn't mind going in for her myself. But it's her business ideas, as she showed them over that factory of Edmondson's, that I can't stand. The way she stuck up the rent on you, me lad, is the limit. Why, if that sort of thing went on, nobody would be safe. It's Oil-Trust morals. I'm Welsh myself, but I do draw the line somewhere."

"What, Welsh?" said Carter politely. "I should never have guessed it."

"I am," said Captain Image with sturdy truth, "and many times, look you, I am proud of it. Which reminds me that little red-bearded Kettle that you employed to run your launch and the mine is Welsh also. I don't want to go against a fellow-countryman who's down on his luck, but I saw him with my own eyes give old Kallee an illustrated methody tract on bigamy when he was on the _M'poso_, and if His Portliness finds anyone kind enough to translate it for him, there'll be the devil to pay. Kallee's black, but he's a king, and he's not the kind to let any man tamper with his domestic happiness. Now about Slade----"

"We'll drop Slade. He's Miss O'Neill's man. If Miss O'Neill chooses to amuse herself by gunning for me, that's her concern. But I don't shoot back."

Captain Image shook his head sadly. "Well, me lad, if you won't lift a hand to help yourself, I don't see there's anything more to be said." He put his pipe in his pocket, stood up and prepared to go. "Oh, by the way, did anyone tell you about old Swizzle-Stick Smith?"

"Not dead, is he?"

"Lord bless you, no, me lad. Very much the reverse. Look here, what was your idea of that man?"

"In what way?"

"What was he before he became the disreputable old palm oil ruffian you first knew at Malla-Nulla?"

"Oh, I suppose he was less disreputable once. He'd let himself drift, that's all. One does get into frightfully slack ways in those lonely factories."

"Did he strike you as the usual type of man a factory agent's made of?"

"Why, no."

"Gentleman, wasn't he, or had been once? Always used to hitch up the knees of his pyjamas when he sat down; spoke well; knew Latin; could swear round any man on the Coast when he was that side out; and had a pleasant way of making you feel you were dirt when the mood took him that way?"

Carter laughed. "He had some characteristic little ways."

"Ever strike you he'd been a soldier once?"

"I suppose it did."

"Well, me lad, when I was tied up by that Edmondson factory, a boat swung up to my ladder and a military party stepped out. Quite the swell, I can tell you: nobby white helmet, hair cut with scissors, smart gray mustache, gray imperial bristling underneath it, clean-shaved chin, white drill coat with concertina pockets, white drill pants with a crease down the shin, latest thing in pipe-clayed shoes. If it hadn't been for the old trick with the eye-glass and the black ribbon, I take my dick I shouldn't have known him.

"'Hullo Swizzle-Stick Smith,' said I, 'you are a howler. Whose kit have you been robbing?'

"'Captain Image,' says he, 'allow me--ar--to present to you Mr. Smith, a new acquaintance. It is not--ar--my wish to be mistaken for any of your discreditable--ar--pot companions of the past.' That to me, and on my own deck, me lad. What do you think of that?"

"I bet you boiled."

Captain Image scratched his head vexedly. "The rum part of it is, I didn't. Somehow I took the man at his own valuation. There didn't seem anything else left to do. He went into my chart house, and sat there as solid as if he'd been the governor of a colony with six letters after his name. Just drank one cocktail and took three swallows at it, I'll trouble you, and actually left a second to stand by itself on the tray. When I handed him the tobacco tin to see if he'd got that frowsy old pipe in his pocket, I'm hanged if he didn't pull out a book of cigarette papers and roll himself a smoke with those. Well, me lad, when I remembered Swizzle-Stick Smith's opinion of cigarettes, you might have knocked me down with a teaspoon."

"He scared me out of cigarette smoking at Malla-Nulla," said Carter. "He was pretty emphatic over the weak-kneed crowd (as he called them) who only smoked cigarettes. But why all this revolution in Mr. Smith's habits? Did he give any reason for it?"

"That's the amazing thing, he didn't--at least not a proper reason. He just let me see that the new Mr. Smith--I got to calling him Major, by the way--was no relation to the Swizzle-Stick Smith that was, and then went back over the side to his boat."

"I suppose," said Carter thoughtfully, "he wanted the reformation to be advertised."

"Well, you don't think I'd keep a choice bit like that to myself," said Captain Image. "Naturally I spread the news, though I certainly didn't tell all the Coast, as I've told you, the way that the late Swizzle-Stick Smith made me feel second man in my own chart house. But that man doesn't need any advertising; the most genial drunk wouldn't take liberties with him, and you'd fall into calling him Major yourself if you sat with him for ten minutes. My Christian Aunt! just think what a filthy old palm oil ruffian he used to be."

"Did he give any reason for pulling up?"

"Oh, I asked him that. Managed to slip it in, you know. And he answered as dry as you please, 'Urgent private affairs, Captain Image,' and then tagged on some Latin, which, as he remarked would be the case, I didn't understand. You know, me lad," said the sailor thoughtfully, "he's a gentleman right through, but I shouldn't think that even in his palmy days he was a man who would have got on particularly well with the people. A bit superior, I should call it, with those who hadn't been birched in the same public school where he was birched."

"I suppose," said Carter, "this is another instance of Miss O'Neill's influence."

"As to that," said Image, "I can't say, me lad; but this I can tell you, the Major's what he calls 'sent in his papers' to O'Neill and Craven's."

"The deuce he has. What on earth for?"

"Can't tell you. Old Crewdson gave me the news. I said to him I didn't suppose the loss of Swizzle-Stick Smith, even now that he had changed himself into Major Smith, would make their firm put up the shutters. But Crewdson wouldn't take it as a joke. He told me Miss Kate was very sorry indeed to lose him, and had herself written to ask him to come and see her here in England. Now, me lad, what's her game in that?"

"I didn't know," said Carter resolutely, "and I don't want to know. As I tell you, I flatly refuse to interfere in any of Miss O'Neill's affairs."