The Third R. Austin Freeman Megapack. R. Austin Freeman
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home. Have a cocktail.” He compounded one for himself, swizzling up the pink mixture with deliberate care and pouring it down his throat with the skill of a juggler; and when Walker had declined the refreshment and lit his pipe, the pair sat and listened to the threats and challenges from the outer darkness. The attitude of masterly inactivity was justified by its results, for the noise subsided by degrees, and presently the rumble of drums and the sound of chanting voices told them that the interrupted revels had been resumed.
After the third application to the stone bottle Larkom began to grow sleepy and subsided into silence, broken at intervals by an abortive snore. Walker meanwhile smoked his pipe and regarded his host with an air of gloomy meditation. At length, as the latter became more and more somnolent, he ventured to rouse him up.
“You haven’t said what you are going to do, Larkom,” said he. “Are you going to put me up for a time?”
Larkom sat up in the squeaking chair and stared at him owlishly. “Put you up, ol’ f’ler?” said he. “Lor bless you, yes. Wodjer think? Bed been ready for you for mor’n a week. Come’n look at it. Gettin’ dam late. Less’ turn in.” He took up the lamp and walked with unsteady steps through a doorway into a small, bare room, the whitewashed walls of which were tastefully decorated with the mud-built nests of solitary wasps. It contained two bedsteads, each fitted with a mosquito net and furnished with a mattress, composed of bundles of rushes lashed together, and covered with a grass mat.
“Thash your doss, ol’ f’ler,” said Larkom, placing the lamp on the packing-case that served for a table, “this is mine. Goo’ night!” He lifted the mosquito-curtain, crept inside, tucked the curtain under the mattress, and forthwith began to snore softly.
Walker fetched in his trunk from the outer room, and, as he exchanged his drill clothes (which he folded carefully as he removed them) for a suit of pyjamas, he looked curiously round the room. A huge, hairy spider was spread out on the wall as if displayed in a collector’s cabinet, and above him a brown cockroach of colossal proportions twirled his long antennae thoughtfully. The low, bumpy ceiling formed a promenade for two pallid, goggle-eyed lizards, who strolled about, defiant of the laws of gravity, picking up an occasional moth or soft-shelled beetle as they went. When he was half undressed an enormous fruit-bat, with a head like that of a fox-terrier, blundered in through the open window and flopped about the room in noisy panic for several minutes before it could find its way out again.
At length he put out the lamp, and creeping inside his curtain, tucked it in securely; and soon, despite the hollow boom of the surf, the whistle of multitudinous bats, the piping of the mosquitoes, and the sounds of revelry from the village, he fell asleep and slept until the sun streamed in on to the whitewashed wall.
CHAPTER II
The Legatee
Larkom appeared to have that tolerance of alcohol that is often to be observed in the confirmed soaker. As he sat with his guest in the living-room, taking his early tea, although he looked frail and broken in health, there was nothing in his appearance to suggest that he had quite recently been very drunk. Nor, on the other hand, was his manner very different from that of the previous night, save that his articulation and his wits were both clearer.
“What made you pick out this particular health-resort for your little holiday?” he asked. “It isn’t what you would call a fashionable watering-place.”
“No,” replied Walker. “That was the attraction. I had heard about you from Hepburn—he is my brother-in-law, you know—and as it seemed, from what he said, that your abode was on the very outside edge of the world, I marked it down as a good place to disappear in.”
Larkom grinned. “You are not a bad judge, old chappie. Disappearing is our speciality. We are famous for it. Always have been. How does the old mariners’ ditty run? You remember it? ‘Oh, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Benin, One comes out where three go in.’ But perhaps that wasn’t exactly what was in your mind?”
“It wasn’t. I could have managed that sort of disappearance without coming so far. But look here, Larkom, let us have a clear understanding. I came here on spec, not having much time to make arrangements, on the chance that you might be willing to put me up and give me a job. But I haven’t come to fasten on to you. If my presence here will be in any way a hindrance to you, you’ve only got to say so and I will move on. And I shan’t take it as unfriendly. I quite understand that you have your principals to consider.”
“Principals be blowed!” said Larkom. “They don’t come into it; and as to me, I can assure you, J. W., that this is the first stroke of luck I’ve had for years. After vegetating in this God-forgotten hole with nobody but buck-niggers to speak to, you can imagine what it is to me to have a pukka white man—and a gentleman at that—under my roof. I feel like chanting ‘Domine, non sum dignus’; but if you can put up with me, stay as long as you care to, and understand that you are doing me a favour by staying.”
“It is very handsome of you, Larkom, to put it in that way,” said Walker, a little huskily. “Of course, I understand the position and I accept your offer gratefully. But we must put the arrangement on a business footing. I’m not going to sponge on you. I must pay my share of the expenses, and if I can give you any help in working the factory—”
“Don’t you be afraid, old chappie,” interrupted Larkom. “I’ll keep your nose on the grindstone; and as to sharing up, we can see to that later when we cast up the accounts. As soon as we have lapped up our tea, we will go out to the store and I will show you the ropes. They aren’t very complicated, though they are in a bit of a tangle just now. But that is where you will come in, dear boy.”
Larkom’s statement as to the ‘tangle’ was certainly no exaggeration. The spectacle of muddle and disorder that the store presented filled Walker at once with joy and exasperation. After a brief tour of the premises, during which he listened in grim silence to Larkom’s explanations, he deliberately peeled off his jacket—which he folded up neatly and put in a place of safety—and fell to work on the shelves and lockers with a concentrated energy that reduced the native helper to gibbering astonishment and Larkom to indulgent sniggers.
“Don’t overdo it, old chap,” the latter admonished. “Remember the climate. And there’s no hurry. Plenty of spare time in these parts. Leave yourself a bit for tomorrow.” To all of which advice Walker paid no attention whatever, but slogged away at the confused raffle of stock-in-trade without a pause until close upon noon, when the cook came out to announce that “chop live for table.” And even this was but a temporary pause; for soon after breakfast—or tiffin, as the Anglo-Indian calls it—when Larkom showed a tendency to doze in his chair with a tumbler of gin toddy, he stole away to renew his onslaught while the native assistant attended to the ‘trade.’
During the next few days he was kept pretty fully occupied. Not that there was much business doing at the factory, but Larkom’s hand having become of late so tremulous that writing was impossible, the posting of books and answering of letters had automatically ceased.
“You’re a perfect godsend to me, old chappie,” said Larkom, when, by dint of two days’ continuous labour, the books had been brought up to date, and Walker attacked the arrears of correspondence. “The firm wouldn’t have stood it much longer. They’ve complained of my handwriting already. If you hadn’t come I should have got the order of the boot to a certainty. Now they’ll think I’ve got a native clerk from somewhere at my own expense.”
“How about the signature?” Walker asked. “Can you manage that?”
“That’s all right, dear boy,” said Larkom cheerfully. “You sign slowly while I kick the table. They’ll never twig the difference.”
By means of this novel aid to calligraphy the letter was completed and duly dispatched by a messenger to catch the land post at Quittah. Then Walker had leisure to look about him and study the methods of West Coast trade and the manners and customs of his host. Larkom sober was not very different from Larkom drunk—amiable, easy-going, irresponsible, and only a little less cheerful. Perhaps he was better drunk. At any rate, that was his