in those parts. And it seemed very likely, for he stood there perfectly
straight, almost at attention, his hands loosely by his sides, as the
three crated coffins were hoisted inboard. When the third crate came
swinging in over the rail he removed his hat casually, as if to get the
benefit of the light breeze that had just sprung up from the north, the
direction of the open sea, and then, looking round him almost furtively,
lifted his right hand under the cover of the hat held in his left hand
and made a quick abbreviated sign of the cross. Even in that heat I
could feel the cold cat’s-paw of a shiver brush lightly across my
shoulders. I don’t know why; not even by the furthest stretch of
imagination could I visualise that prosaic hatchway giving on number
four hold as an open grave. One of my grandmothers was Scots; maybe I
was psychic or had the second sight or whatever it was they called it up
in the highlands, or maybe I had just lunched too well. Whatever might
have upset me, it didn’t seem to have upset senor carreras. He replaced
his hat as the last of the crates touched lightly on the floor of the
hold, stared down at it for a few seconds, then turned and made his way
forward, lifting his hat again and giving me a clear, untroubled smile
as he came by. For want of anything better to do, I smiled back at him.
Five minutes later the ancient truck, the two packards, the jeep, and
the last of the stevedores were gone and macdonald was busy supervising
the placing of the battens on number four hold. By five o’clock, a
whole hour before deadline and exactly on the top of the tide, the S.S.
Campari was steaming slowly over the bar to the north of the harbour,
then northwest into the setting sun, carrying with it its cargo of
crates and machinery and dead men, its fuming captain, disgruntled crew,
and thoroughly outraged passengers. At five o’clock on that brilliant
june evening it was not what one might have called a happy ship.
Chapter 2
[Tuesday 8 p.m.-9.30 p.m.]
by eight o’clock that night cargo, crates, and coffins were,
presumably, just as they had been at five o’clock; but among the living
cargo the change for the better, from deep discontent to something
closely approaching lighthearted satisfaction, was marked and profound.
There were reasons for this, of course. In captain Bullen’s case-he
twice called me “johnny-me-boy” as he sent me down for dinner-it was
because he was clear of what he was pleased to regard as the pestiferous
port of carracio, because he was at sea again, because he was on his
bridge again, and because he had thought up an excellent reason for
sending me below while he remained on the bridge, thus avoiding the
social torture of having to dine with the passengers. In the crew’s
case it was because the captain had seen fit, partly out of a sense of
justice and partly to repay the head office for the indignities they had
heaped on him, to award them all many more hours’ overtime than they
were actually entitled to for their off-duty labours in the past three
days. And in the case of the officers and passengers it was simply
because there are certain well-defined fundamental laws of human nature
and one of them was that it was impossible to be miserable for long
aboard the s.s. campari. As a vessel with no regular ports of call,
with only very limited passenger accommodation and capacious cargo holds
that were seldom far from full, the s.s. campari could properly be
classed as a tramp ship and indeed was so classed in the blue mail’s
brochures. But-as the brochures pointed out with a properly delicate
restraint in keeping with the presumably refined sensibilities of the
extraordinarily wellheeled clientele it was addressing-the s.s. campari
was no ordinary tramp ship. Indeed, it was no ordinary ship in any
sense at all. It was, as the brochure said simply, without any
pretentiousness and in exactly those words, “a medium-sized cargo vessel
offering the most luxurious accommodation and finest cuisine of any ship
in the world to-day.” it was the chairman of the blue mail, lord
dexter, who had obviously kept all his brains to himself and refrained
from passing any on to his son, our current fourth officer, who had
thought it up. It was, as all his competitors who were now exerting
themselves strenuously to get into the act admitted, a stroke of pure
genius. Lord dexter concurred. It had started off simply enough in the
early fifties with an earlier blue mail vessel, the s.s. brandywine.
(for some strange whimsy, explicable only on a psychoanalyst’s couch,
lord dexter, himself a rabid teetotaller, had elected to name his
various ships after divers wines and other spirituous liquors.) the
brandywine had been one of two blue mail vessels engaged on a regular
run between new york and various british possessions in the west indies,
and lord dexter, eying the luxury cruise liners which plied regularly
between new york and the caribbean and seeing no good reason why he
shouldn’t elbow his way into this lucrative dollar-earning market, had
some extra cabins fitted on the brandywine and advertised them in a few
very select american newspapers and magazines, making it quite plain
that he was interested only in top people. Among the attractions
offered had been a complete absence of bands, dances, concerts,
fancy-dress balls, swimming pools, tombola, deck games, sight-seeing and
parties. A genius could have made such desirable and splendidly
resounding virtues out of things he didn’t have anyway. All he offered
on the positive side was the mystery and romance of a tramp ship which
sailed to unknown destinations-this didn’t make any alterations to
regular schedules; all it meant was that the captain kept the names of
the various ports of call to himself until shortly before he arrived
there and the resources and comfort of a telegraph lounge which remained
in continuous touch with the new york, london, and paris stock
exchanges. The initial success of the scheme was fantastic. In stock
exchange parlance, the issue was oversubscribed a hundred times. This
was intolerable to lord dexter; he was obviously attracting far too many
of the not quite top people, aspiring would-he’s on the lower-middle
rungs of the ladder who had not yet got past their first few million,
people with whom top people would not care to associate. He doubled his
prices. It made no difference. He trebled them and in the process made
the gratifying discovery that there were many people in the world who
would pay literally almost anything not only to be different and
exclusive but to be known to be different and exclusive. Lord dexter
held up the building of his latest ship, the campari, had designed and
built into her a dozen of the most luxurious cabin suites ever seen, and
sent her to new york, confident that she would soon recoup the outlay of
a quarter of a million pounds extra cost incurred through the building
of those cabins. As usual, his confidence was not misplaced. There
were imitators, of course, but one might as well have tried to imitate
buckingham palace, the grand canyon, or the cullinan diamond. Lord
dexter left them all at the starting date. He had found his formula and
he stuck to it unswervingly: comfort, convenience, quiet, good food, and
good company. Where comfort was concerned, the fabulous luxury of the
staterooms had to be seen to be believed; convenience, as far as the
vast majority of the male passengers was concerned, found its ultimate
in the juxtaposition, in the campari’s unique telegraph lounge, of the
stock-exchange tickers and one of the most superbly stocked bars in the
world. Quiet was achieved by an advanced degree of insulation both in
cabin suites and engine room, by imitating the royal yacht britannia
inasmuch as that no orders were ever shouted and the deck crew and
stewards invariably wore rubber-soled sandals and by eliminating all the
bands, parties, games, and dances which lesser cruise passengers
believed essential for the enjoyment of shipboard life. The magnificent
cuisine had been achieved by luring away, at vast cost and the expense
of even more bad feeling, the chefs from one of the biggest embassies in
london and one of the finest hotels in paris; those masters of the
culinary world operated on alternate days, and the paradisical results
of their efforts to outdo one another was the envious talk of the
western ocean. Other ship owners might, perhaps, have succeeded in
imitating some or all of those features, although almost certainly to a
lesser degree. But lord dexter was no ordinary ship owner. He was, as
said, a genius, and he showed it in his insistence, above all, on having
the right people aboard. Never a single trip passed but the campari had