Tono Bungay

I pass the Hardingham ever and again and glance aside through the great archway at the fountain and the ferns, and think of those receding days when I was so near the centre of our eddy of greed and enterprise.  I see again my uncle’s face, white and intent, and hear him discourse, hear him make consciously Napoleonic decisions, “grip” his nettles, put his “finger on the spot,” “bluff,” say “snap.”  He became particularly addicted to the last idiom.  Towards the end every conceivable act took the form of saying “snap!”

The odd fish that came to us!  And among others came Gordon-Nasmyth, that queer blend of romance and illegality who was destined to drag me into the most irrelevant adventure in my life the Mordet Island affair; and leave me, as they say, with blood upon my hands.  It is remarkable how little it troubles my conscience and how much it stirs my imagination, that particular memory of the life I took.  The story of Mordet Island has been told in a government report and told all wrong; there are still excellent reasons for leaving it wrong in places, but the liveliest appeals of discretion forbid my leaving it out altogether.

I’ve still the vividest memory of Gordon-Nasmyth’s appearance in the inner sanctum, a lank, sunburnt person in tweeds with a yellow-brown hatchet face and one faded blue eye—­the other was a closed and sunken lid—­and how he told us with a stiff affectation of ease his incredible story of this great heap of quap that lay abandoned or undiscovered on the beach behind Mordet’s Island among white dead mangroves and the black ooze of brackish water.

“What’s quap?” said my uncle on the fourth repetition of the word.

“They call it quap, or quab, or quabb,” said Gordon-Nasmyth; “but our relations weren’t friendly enough to get the accent right….

But there the stuff is for the taking.  They don’t know about it.

Nobody knows about it.  I got down to the damned place in a canoe alone.  The boys wouldn’t come.  I pretended to be botanising.” ...

To begin with, Gordon-Nasmyth was inclined to be dramatic.

“Look here,” he said when he first came in, shutting the door rather carefully behind him as he spoke, “do you two men—­yes or no—­want to put up six thousand—­for—­a clear good chance of fifteen hundred per cent. on your money in a year?”

“We’re always getting chances like that,” said my uncle, cocking his cigar offensively, wiping his glasses and tilting his chair back.  “We stick to a safe twenty.”

Gordon-Nasmyth’s quick temper showed in a slight stiffening of his attitude.

“Don’t you believe him,” said I, getting up before he could reply.  “You’re different, and I know your books.  We’re very glad you’ve come to us.  Confound it, uncle!  Its Gordon-Nasmyth!  Sit down.  What is it?  Minerals?”

“Quap,” said Gordon-Nasmyth, fixing his eye on me, “in heaps.”

“In heaps,” said my uncle softly, with his glasses very oblique.

“You’re only fit for the grocery,” said Gordon-Nasmyth scornfully, sitting down and helping himself to one of my uncle’s cigars.  “I’m sorry I came.  But, still, now I’m here….  And first as to quap; quap, sir, is the most radio-active stuff in the world.  That’s quap!  It’s a festering mass of earths and heavy metals, polonium, radium, ythorium, thorium, carium, and new things, too.  There’s a stuff called Xk—­provisionally.  There they are, mucked up together in a sort of rotting sand.  What it is, how it got made, I don’t know.  It’s like as if some young creator had been playing about there.  There it lies in two heaps, one small, one great, and the world for miles about it is blasted and scorched and dead.  You can have it for the getting.  You’ve got to take it—­that’s all!”

“That sounds all right,” said I.  “Have you samples?”

“Well—­should I?  You can have anything—­up to two ounces.”

“Where is it?”...

His blue eye smiled at me and scrutinised me.  He smoked and was fragmentary for a time, fending off my questions; then his story began to piece itself together.  He conjured up a vision of this strange forgotten kink in the world’s littoral, of the long meandering channels that spread and divaricate and spend their burden of mud and silt within the thunderbelt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled vegetation that creeps into the shimmering water with root and sucker.  He gave a sense of heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and told how at last comes a break among these things, an arena fringed with bone-white dead trees, a sight of the hard-blue sea line beyond the dazzling surf and a wide desolation of dirty shingle and mud, bleached and scarred….  A little way off among charred dead weeds stands the abandoned station,—­abandoned because every man who stayed two months at that station stayed to die, eaten up mysteriously like a leper with its dismantled sheds and its decaying pier of wormrotten and oblique piles and planks, still insecurely possible.

And in the midst, two clumsy heaps shaped like the backs of hogs, one small, one great, sticking out under a rib of rock that cuts the space across,—­quap!

“There it is,” said Gordon-Nasmyth, “worth three pounds an ounce, if it’s worth a penny; two great heaps of it, rotten stuff and soft, ready to shovel and wheel, and you may get it by the ton!”

“How did it get there?”

“God knows! ...  There it is—­for the taking!  In a country where you mustn’t trade.  In a country where the company waits for good kind men to find it riches and then take ’em away from ’em.  There you have it—­derelict.”

“Can’t you do any sort of deal?”

“They’re too damned stupid.  You’ve got to go and take it.  That’s all.”

“They might catch you.”

“They might, of course.  But they’re not great at catching.”

We went into the particulars of that difficulty.  “They wouldn’t catch me, because I’d sink first.  Give me a yacht,” said Gordon-Nasmyth; “that’s all I need.”

“But if you get caught,” said my uncle.

I am inclined to think Gordon-Nasmyth imagined we would give him a cheque for six thousand pounds on the strength of his talk.  It was very good talk, but we didn’t do that.  I stipulated for samples of his stuff for analysis, and he consented—­reluctantly.

I think, on the whole, he would rather I didn’t examine samples.  He made a motion pocketwards, that gave us an invincible persuasion that he had a sample upon him, and that at the last instant he decided not to produce it prematurely.

There was evidently a curious strain of secretiveness in him.  He didn’t like to give us samples, and he wouldn’t indicate within three hundred miles the position of this Mordet Island of his.  He had it clear in his mind that he had a secret of immense value, and he had no idea at all of just how far he ought to go with business people.  And so presently, to gain time for these hesitations of his, he began to talk of other things.  He talked very well.  He talked of the Dutch East Indies and of the Congo, of Portuguese East Africa and Paraguay, of Malays and rich Chinese merchants, Dyaks and negroes and the spread of the Mahometan world in Africa to-day.  And all this time he was trying to judge if we were good enough to trust with his adventure.  Our cosy inner office became a little place, and all our business cold and lifeless exploits beside his glimpses of strange minglings of men, of slayings unavenged and curious customs, of trade where no writs run, and the dark treacheries of eastern ports and uncharted channels.

We had neither of us gone abroad except for a few vulgar raids on Paris; our world was England, are the places of origin of half the raw material of the goods we sold had seemed to us as remote as fairyland or the forest of Arden.  But Gordon-Nasmyth made it so real and intimate for us that afternoon—­for me, at any rate—­that it seemed like something seen and forgotten and now again remembered.

And in the end he produced his sample, a little lump of muddy clay speckled with brownish grains, in a glass bottle wrapped about with lead and flannel—­red flannel it was, I remember—­a hue which is, I know, popularly supposed to double all the mystical efficacies of flannel.

“Don’t carry it about on you,” said Gordon-Nasmyth.  “It makes a sore.”

I took the stuff to Thorold, and Thorold had the exquisite agony of discovering two new elements in what was then a confidential analysis.  He has christened them and published since, but at the time Gordon-Nasmyth wouldn’t hear for a moment of our publication of any facts at all; indeed, he flew into a violent passion and abused me mercilessly even for showing the stuff to Thorold.  “I thought you were going to analyse it yourself,” he said with the touching persuasion of the layman that a scientific man knows and practises at the sciences.

I made some commercial inquiries, and there seemed even then much truth in Gordon-Nasmyth’s estimate of the value of the stuff.  It was before the days of Capern’s discovery of the value of canadium and his use of it in the Capern filament, but the cerium and thorium alone were worth the money he extracted for the gas-mantles then in vogue.  There were, however, doubts.  Indeed, there were numerous doubts.  What were the limits of the gas-mantle trade?  How much thorium, not to speak of cerium, could they take at a maximum.  Suppose that quantity was high enough to justify our shipload, came doubts in another quarter.  Were the heaps up to sample?  Were they as big as he said?  Was Gordon-Nasmyth—­imaginative?  And if these values held, could we after all get the stuff?  It wasn’t ours.  It was on forbidden ground.  You see, there were doubts of every grade and class in the way of this adventure.

We went some way, nevertheless, in the discussion of his project, though I think we tried his patience.  Then suddenly he vanished from London, and I saw no more of him for a year and a half.

My uncle said that was what he had expected, and when at last Gordon-Nasmyth reappeared and mentioned in an incidental way that he had been to Paraguay on private (and we guessed passionate) affairs, the business of the “quap” expedition had to be begun again at the beginning.  My uncle was disposed to be altogether sceptical, but I wasn’t so decided.  I think I was drawn by its picturesque aspects.  But we neither of us dreamt of touching it seriously until Capern’s discovery.

Nasmyth’s story had laid hold of my imagination like one small, intense picture of tropical sunshine hung on a wall of grey business affairs.  I kept it going during Gordon-Nasmyth’s intermittent appearances in England.  Every now and then he and I would meet and reinforce its effect.  We would lunch in London, or he would cone to see my gliders at Crest Hill, and make new projects for getting at those heaps again now with me, now alone.

At times they became a sort of fairy-story with us, an imaginative exercise.  And there came Capern’s discovery of what he called the ideal filament and with it an altogether less problematical quality about the business side of quap.  For the ideal filament needed five per cent. of canadium, and canadium was known to the world only as a newly separated constituent of a variety of the rare mineral rutile.  But to Thorold it was better known as an element in a mysterious sample brought to him by me, and to me it was known as one of the elements in quap.  I told my uncle, and we jumped on to the process at once.  We found that Gordon-Nasmyth, still unaware of the altered value of the stuff, and still thinking of the experimental prices of radium and the rarity value of cerium, had got hold of a cousin named Pollack, made some extraordinary transaction about his life insurance policy, and was buying a brig.  We put in, put down three thousand pounds, and forthwith the life insurance transaction and the Pollack side of this finance vanished into thin air, leaving Pollack, I regret to say, in the brig and in the secret—­except so far as canadium and the filament went—­as residuum.  We discussed earnestly whether we should charter a steamer or go on with the brig, but we decided on the brig as a less conspicuous instrument for an enterprise that was after all, to put it plainly, stealing.

But that was one of our last enterprises before our great crisis, and I will tell of it in its place.

So it was quap came into our affairs, came in as a fairy-tale and became real.  More and more real it grew until at last it was real, until at last I saw with my eyes the heaps my imagination had seen for so long, and felt between my fingers again that half-gritty, half soft texture of quap, like sanded moist-sugar mixed with clay in which there stirs something—­

One must feel it to understand.