Travel Scholarships. Jules Verne
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perhaps he had gone too far, and he employed his most soothing phrases to reassure Mrs. Patterson, his better half, or rather one of the halves of this shared life that is called marriage. Finally, he succeeded in showing her that excessive precautions could never lead to harmful or regrettable consequences, and that to protect oneself against all eventualities did not mean saying goodbye to the joys of life.
“I am thinking about making my will!”
“This aeternum vale,”5 he added, “which Ovid places in Orpheus’s mouth when he lost his dear Eurydice for the second time …”
No! Mrs. Patterson would not lose Mr. Patterson, not even a first time. But this meticulous man insisted that everything be in order. He would not give up this idea of making his will. That very day, he would go to a notary’s office, and the document would be drawn up according to the law so that there would be no possibility, in case it had to be consulted, of any doubtful interpretation. After this, one can easily imagine Mr. Patterson taking every possible precaution in case it was fated that the Alert go down at sea with all hands and cargo, forcing the surviving families to give up receiving any news from its crew or its passengers.
Doubtless this was not Mr. Patterson’s opinion, because he added: “And besides, there will perhaps be another step that is more …”
“Which one, Horatio?” Mrs. Patterson asked.
Mr. Patterson did not feel the need to be more specific at this time. “Nothing … Nothing … We will see! …” he answered. And if he had not wanted to say more, it was, in truth, in order not to frighten Mrs. Patterson again. And perhaps he would not have succeeded in making her accept his idea, even by supporting it with some other Latin quote, and he was not accustomed to using them sparingly with her normally.
Finally, to end this conversation, he concluded in these terms:
“And now, let’s take care of my luggage and my hat box.”
True, the departure was still five days away, but what is already done no longer needs to be done.
In other words, for Mr. Patterson as for the young award winners, all that remained for them to do was to prepare for the voyage.
In fact, if the Alert’s departure was set for June 30, then from the five days left it was necessary to deduct twenty-four hours to get from London to Cork.
Indeed, the train would first transport the passengers to Bristol. There, they would board the steamer with daily service between England and Ireland, they would go down the Severn, they would cross the Bristol Channel, then the Saint George’s Channel, and would disembark at Queenstown, on the mouth of Cork Harbor, on the southwest coast of green Erin. One day was all that was required to sail between Great Britain and Ireland, and for Mr. Patterson that would be sufficient training for the sea.
The families of the young scholarship recipients had been consulted and the responses were not long in arriving, either by telegram or by letter. For Roger Hinsdale, the response was the very same day, since his parents lived in London, and it was the laureate himself who went to inform them of Mrs. Seymour’s intentions.
The other responses arrived successively from Manchester, Paris, Nantes, Copenhagen, Rotterdam, and Goteborg. Hubert Perkins’s family wired a telegram from Antigua.
The proposal received the most favorable reaction, with very sincere thanks to Mrs. Seymour of Barbados.
While Mrs. Patterson was taking care of the travel preparations for her husband, Mr. Patterson was putting the finishing touches on the Antillean School’s general accounting. One could be sure that he would not leave a single pending invoice or an incomplete entry.
Then, he would ask his superiors for a leave from his managerial duties beginning June 28 of the current year.
At the same time, he did not forget any of his personal errands, and he no doubt settled, as he intended, that matter which was especially important to him and about which he had to speak to Mrs. Patterson more explicitly than he had done during their first conversation.
On that topic, however, the interested parties kept an absolute silence. Would we learn in the future what it was all about? Yes, if, by misfortune, Mr. Horatio Patterson did not come back from the New World!
What is certain is that the couple made several visits to a man of the law, a solicitor, and that they even went before some expert magistrates. And the Antillean School personnel could clearly see that each time Mr. and Mrs. Patterson came back together to their apartment, he looked more solemn, more reserved, while his worthy spouse at times had red eyes as if she had just shed many tears, and at other times had the attitude of someone who had come to terms with a drastic resolution.
Furthermore, and despite the different forms they took, these feelings of sadness seemed very justified under the circumstances.
June 28 arrived. The departure was supposed to take place in the evening. At nine o’clock, the mentor and his young companions would take the train for Bristol.
In the morning, Mr. Julian Ardagh had one last interview with Mr. Patterson.
At the same time that he asked him to keep the books for the trip with perfect regularity—a needless recommendation—he made him feel the great importance of the task that had been entrusted to him, and how much he was counting on him to maintain harmony among the students of the Antillean School.
Then, turning to the nine scholarship recipients …
At eight-thirty in the evening, the goodbyes were exchanged in the main courtyard. Roger Hinsdale, John Howard, Hubert Perkins, Louis Clodion, Tony Renault, Niels Harboe, Axel Wickborn, Albertus Leuwen, and Magnus Anders shook the Director’s hand, the hands of their professors, and those of their classmates, who did not see them off without a little bit of normal envy.
Mr. Horatio Patterson had said goodbye to Mrs. Patterson, whose photograph he carried, and he had expressed himself with emotional phrases, with the conscience of a practical man who had put himself on guard against all eventualities.
Then, turning to the nine scholarship recipients, at the moment when they were going to get into the break6 that was to drive them to the station, he said, articulating each syllable of this verse from Horatio:
Gras ingens iterabimus aequor.7
And now they are off. In a few hours the train will have dropped them off at Bristol. Tomorrow they will cross the Saint George’s Channel that Mr. Patterson has labeled ingens aequor … Happy travels to the laureates of the Antillean School competition!
4 The Blue Fox Tavern
Cork was first called Coves, a name that means a marshy terrain—Corroch in Gaelic. After a modest beginning as a village, Cork became a small town and is currently the capital of Munster and the third largest city in Ireland.
An industrial center of some importance, perhaps its greatest value is as a maritime city that is, thanks to the port at Queenstown—the old Coves—downstream from the river Lee. There are located the shipyards, stores, and factories. The port offers refueling, resupplying, and mooring to all ships, mainly those sailing ships for which the Lee is not deep enough.
Arriving late in Cork, the mentor and the scholarship recipients would not have the time to visit it nor the charming island that connects by two bridges to the two banks of the Lee, nor to stroll through the lovely gardens of the neighboring islands, nor to explore its annexes. That entire municipality comprises no less than eighty-nine thousand inhabitants—seventy-nine thousand for Cork and ten thousand for Queenstown.
But, on the evening of June 29, three individuals seated at the back of one of the rooms of the Blue Fox