A week later they steamed into Sydney harbour and a fortnight after that they steamed out of it again, for both Mr. Darby and Sarah were in a hurry to get home. They travelled by P. &. O., which sails direct and avoids the curious detour northwards taken by the Scarlet Funnel Line. Besides, Mr. Darby had formed the opinion that the Scarlet Funnel ships were unsafe, not only because of the strange habits of the passengers who travelled on them but also because in them, as he himself had proved, it was possible to fall overboard in perfectly calm weather. The passengers on this P. & O. liner were as well-behaved as it is possible for passengers to be, and in any case, with Sarah at hand, Mr. Darby was safe enough from the female half.
Providence, hearing that Mr. Darby had extended a free pardon to England, paved the way of return with fair winds and calm seas. The typhoon that, on the voyage out, had dogged him in the China Sea was ordered to its kennel; the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea were carefully cooled for the occasion. At Aden the ghosts of that ill-matched pair, Lady Gissingham and Mrs. Gudgeon, wished him a prosperous voyage; in the Red Sea the sea-logged corpse of Gudgeon stirred in its fishy grave but sent no disturbing sign to the surface; at Port Said the phantom of Sir Alistair Gissingham cut him dead from a ghostly tender and ghosts of the two young Rentons waved to him and smiled a little superciliously; and throughout the voyage the pleasant, lazy, cynical shadow of Mr. Amberley amused him with inaudible conversation which was more easily understood than much of the audible kind had been.
Where were all those people now? Mr. Darby longed to know. It was sad that they should have vanished so utterly from his life. The first-class passengers on this P. & O. boat were pale and indistinguishable phantoms compared with the vivid reality of those others that still haunted his thoughts. No doubt they had all returned soberly to their unknown homes in England, all except Lady Gissingham. Her it was impossible to imagine peacefully at home. She, strange, frustrated creature, would be wandering the world, seeking in vain for something never to be found. Perhaps she was on board that outward-bound Orient liner they had seen yesterday in Port Said.
After Port Said Mr. Darby felt himself virtually at home already. The Mediterranean to his far-travelled mind was little more than a safe and attractive pleasure-water upon whose tranquil breast one could sit and enjoy, care-free, a cigar and a John Collins. He had already regained all his old plumpness, all his old bland importance. Not that he had forgotten his Kingdom: it was often in his thoughts and, much more often than he could have wished, in his dreams. More than once, in the middle of some hideous nocturnal function in which everything seemed to be going irrecoverably wrong, he would be recalled to safety and reality by a vigorous shake and Sarah’s reassuring rebuke: ‘For goodness sake wake up, Jim, or you’ll rouse the whole ship.’
‘I … I dreamt I was back in Mandras,’ he would babble sleepily.
‘You and your Mandras,’ Sarah would grumble. ‘It seems to me you took the place too seriously. Suppose I was to start screaming about Tongal. We should get locked up as a couple of lunatics, and serve us right. Now off you go to sleep again; but mind, keep clear of Mandras.’
Sarah, too, was enjoying the voyage, she was enjoying even the idleness of it. After all she had been through, it was bliss to sit in a deck-chair and talk to Jim, or to watch him, with a cigar in his mouth, his spectacles reflecting the blue serenity of the sea, puffing importantly up and down the deck like a small, compact steam-engine. She confessed to herself now that there had been periods when she had abandoned hope, given Jim up for lost, though at the time she had resolutely refused to admit it. At such moments her determined search in that strange, almost impenetrable country full of barbarous lunatics seemed nothing more than a wilful self-torturing madness destined to end in heart-breaking disappointment. For surely, even if Jim and Punnett had got to shore, a thing that had seemed almost impossible to the captain of the Utopia and completely impossible to herself when, after weeks of travel, she coasted the peninsula on a stormy evening, surely the two lonely, unarmed creatures would infallibly have been murdered by those excitable hot-headed savages that seemed to her at first sight much more like wild animals than human beings. And yet, after all those days and nights of hideous misgiving, of absolute but unconfessed despair, here they were together again on this comfortable, homely liner, a floating fragment of England. Yes, she was content—far more than content; she was blissfully happy—to sit utterly idle and feast herself on Jim’s mere presence. It seemed to her, in this blessed reaction, that she was cured of all her old desires and antipathies. She had no idea what Jim’s wishes were, what schemes he had for their new life in England. Only one thing was certain: he was permanently cured of the Jungle: there would be no more talk of adventure and exploration. Concerning the various probabilities she was indifferent. If Jim wanted to live in London, they would live in London. If he had some mad scheme for building a great house somewhere in the country, well, he could build it and she would run it for him. Without a murmur she would engage and govern a regiment of servants; she would refrain from making beds and sweeping floors; she would even abandon her job on the H.C.S. Meanwhile there was over a week more of this restful interlude, for by mutual consent they were not leaving the ship at Marseilles, as most of the first-class passengers were doing, but continuing the voyage, more slowly but more restfully, to Tilbury.
• • • • • • • •
It was not till after Marseilles that Mr. Darby broached the subject of a home.
‘I’m rather sorry now, Sarah, I didn’t keep on the house in Bedford Square. It would have been what I should call a peeder-tare, if you know what I mean.’
‘But I don’t, Jim!’ said Sarah. ‘Never heard of the thing! You mean you wish you had it to go back to?’
‘Well … ah … temporariously,’ said Mr. Darby, ‘while we looked out for some suitable … ah … mansion.’
Sarah nodded. ‘Then you’re thinking of a house in London?’
Mr. Darby pursed his lips judicially. ‘I may have to spend a part of the year, for business reasons, in and about the Metropolis.’
‘Quite so!’ said Sarah. ‘And what is the business to be, Jim?’
Mr. Darby affected a certain nonchalance. ‘Oh … ah … well … ah … lecturing and so on. And no doubt they’ll expect me to become a member of the Travellers’ Club.’ He remained for some moments lost in thought. ‘It was a thousand pities,’ he then said, ‘that poor Punnett left the camera on the Utopia. Some photos of Mandras …!’
‘It seems to me, Jim,’ Sarah interrupted, ‘that you remember quite enough of Mandras without having any photos to lead you on.’
‘I was thinking at the moment,’ said Mr. Darby, ‘of … ah … slides.’
‘Slides, Jim?’
‘Ah … yes! Lantern slides for the purposes of … ah … lecturing!’
‘So you’re going to lecture about your adventures?’
‘Well, no doubt I shall be expected to, and if they really insist I don’t see that one can very well refuse, do you?’
‘Well, I could, Jim; but I don’t see why you should refuse if you don’t want to. I fancy you’d enjoy it.’
‘Oh, enjoyment!’ Mr. Darby made a gesture of intolerance. ‘I should regard it as a duty, Sarah.’
‘A duty, Jim? A duty to whom?’
‘Oh … well … ah … to the public, to be shaw! To sosarty in general!’ His tone changed: it became gentle, appealing. ‘You wouldn’t mind now, would you, Sarah, spending part of our time in London?’
Mr. Darby’s now contained volumes. It alluded discreetly to their original separation; it hinted at the immense changes wrought in each of them by their wonderful and appalling adventures; it stressed, with a tinge of something not far from humility, the impossibility of anything like disagreement between them in their present happy state of reunion. It was, indeed, a word, as Mr. Darby had used it, of such potency, such complex allusiveness, that it provided the happiest auguries for his success as a lecturer.
Sarah felt its force and at once reacted to it. ‘I’ll live wherever you like, Jim,’ she replied heartily, ‘short of going back to the Mandratic Peninsula.’
Mr. Darby’s spectacles flooded her with sunshine. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we might put up at the Balmoral and look about us;—Belgravia, Mayfair, and so on.’
But when they had passed Gibraltar (‘One of our national bulwarks, Sarah!’) and the Bay was already safely behind them; when they had steamed up the Channel and entered the mouth of the Thames, the Thames that was so unmistakably England—England in the small smoke-grimed huddled houses on its shores, England in its dreary mud-flats, England in the very quality and touch of its draughty air; Mr. Darby’s immediate schemes for Mayfair and Belgravia suddenly and surprisingly collapsed.
‘Sarah,’ he said to his wife who leaned beside him on the rail, ‘first of all we must go home.’
Sarah’s heart leapt. ‘What, to Number Seven, Jim?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Darby, ‘to Number Seven.’
• • • • • • • •
They did not disembark till close on noon and it was two o’clock when the boat-train steamed into St. Pancras. The moment was a solemn one. Throughout the journey from Tilbury Mr. Darby had not spoken a word: it was no time for talk even of the most serious description. Not that there were any doubts in his mind about the completeness of London’s pardon. He was not one to hold back or make reservations on such an occasion: his was an open and unclouded nature. His silence was due solely to the depth of his feelings and his proper sense of the gravity and of the historical quality of the occasion; and the privileged onlookers who, when the train drew up in the station, noted the exuberance with which he sprang from the train to the platform, can have had little doubt of the cordiality and thoroughness of his forgiveness, as, with no false bashfulness, he took London to his heart. And with a proper gratitude, a proper humility, London responded. The busy crowds that climbed Ludgate Hill noticed a becoming pinkness suffuse the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral; the Cabinet Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Permanent Under-secretaries, M.P.’s and Civil Servants who happened at the moment to be crossing Parliament Square or hurrying south-westward along Parliament Street detected an unusually passionate quality in the tone of Big Ben; the buses as they plied their whirling dance round Trafalgar Square found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly (for the afternoon was overcast) inundated in sunshine; and members of the Stock Exchange stood open-mouthed at an exultant leap in prices unprecedented in the history of finance.
The occasion was as brief as it was pregnant, for the fact was that time was pressing. Only by sacrificing some of his customary dignity did Mr. Darby, accompanied by Sarah and a host of bags and trunks, catch the afternoon train north at King’s Cross.
When they reached Newchester it was already dark, so that the ex-King of Mandras’s return to his native town was incognito. It was better thus, for Mr. Darby was able, as the train swung on to the Redvale Bridge, to enjoy something of those exquisite sensations with which a mother looks down on her sleeping child. For there below him, utterly unconscious of his benign presence, lay the Quayside and the Valley of the Dole, starred by a thousand twinkling lights. In the darkness that divided those yellow sparks, a rarer sprinkling of rubies and emeralds told of the unseen river and the ships; and even now, at the thought of the ships, Mr. Darby’s heart thrilled. Despite long nights of hideous instability, days of headlong flight from typhoons, despite the appalling plunge overboard and the damp and precarious trip on a bare life-buoy, the old excitement, the old spirit of adventure was still there, ready to flame up, unquenched, at the old unforgettable summons.
They had dined in the train. Tired-out by the emotions of the day they went to bed almost as soon as they reached Number Seven Moseley Terrace.