Oscar and Luanda

by the process as she always would be by the collaborative nature of human endeavour. She saw she had purchased a hell-hole that must always be a hell-hole and yet she was much affected by the way the men made themselves into a chain with chaos at one end and civilization at the other-the cockeyed little first gatherer, the sturdy, barrelchested second gatherer, the handsome old third gatherer who would never be a master, the blower himself with his great grey beard and his arms as big as a boy's legs, the finicky stopper-offer who ran about, fast, bent over, like a mynah bird on a branch. She had felt it wrong to be the proprietor of such a hell-hole where the men must work in water-doused chaff bags, be awake at three a.m. (or ten p.m. or dawn) to meet the demands of the furnaces. But even though she could never become romantic about the hardness of their lives she also came to envy them their useful comradeship and it was through the doorway of a game of cards she hoped to enter it. She aspired only to play a useful part in manufacture, even though she was their "master."

Their rejection of her produced the most unchristian passions in her breast. "No gentleman," they told her, "would gamble with a lady." Her feelings were of the same order as those of a parent who wants to dash a howling baby to the floor.

She listened to the Leviathan's stewards and imagined being admitted to their game. She would knock on their door. She would introduce herself.

But she knew, of course, that they would immediately revert to their "steward" character. It would be an intrusion on their privacy too gross to contemplate. But surely, somewhere, there was a game got up. She imagined carpenters and engineers 'tween decks. She took her own deck of cards, the new ones purchased in Old Bond Street. They were Wetherby Suprêmes with the handsome black and gold filigree on their calendered backs which she always believed to be especially lucky. She snapped open the griffin seal which kept them in their place and shuffled them in her practical little hands, lengthening her top lip as she always did when excited-not a useful tic for a poker player to have-and cut them, splayed them, made a bridge and closed it. She had an ache. She felt it in the back of her knees, in her knuckles, a tension both pleasant and unbearable.

If she just walked, for instance, down to the regions known as 'tween decks, there would be an open door. There would be a game. She would stand and watch. They would not mind. She imagined it exactly. Four working men at a table. She would show them her own cards. 190

Pachinko

Silly. Too stupid for words.

She put her Wetherby Suprêmes in her velvet purse and walked out of her stateroom. She was going for a walk, that was all.

She was going-of course she was-to inspect her cargo in the hold. This was her right. She was a manufacturer. She might not look like one to you, sir, but that only demonstrates your colonial nature. Not all manufacturers have side-whiskers and smoke cigars.

The equipment was from Chance Brothers. It would make the first window glass in New South Wales. She did not expect a town named after her for this. But neither, sir, did she expect to be patronized.

She opened the door to C deck and descended the stairs. She did not think about what she was doing.

Lucinda was looking for a game.

She moved along steel intestines of empty corridors from which she viewed, not four men around a table, but empty cabins whose new mattresses were still wrapped in brown paper; in some there were wood shavings and sawdust, even on D deck-a carpenter's tool box with a set of chisels so sharp that the sticky-beaking passenger cut her finger and had nothing but sawdust with which to staunch the flow.

It was not like being inside a ship at all, but like the innards of a reveted bridge, a great mechanical beast, the organs of an empire whose chimneys rose high into the Atlantic sky. E deck contained animals, stall after stall of sheep, cattle, llamas. There was a sort of terror here. The air was not pleasant. It was rich and thick enough to make her-she who still thought herself a countrywoman, at home with dung, mud, beasts-rich and thick enough to make her gag. There were caged birds, too, and a young lad who said it was his job to feed them and wanted, most of all, to know what it was like atop. He was a strong, well-made boy, but his face was pale, and his face thrust at her from the fetid gloom-one yellow electric light every ten yards-and she did not feel easy with his belligerent curiosity. He was not what she was looking for. He asked if she was a nurse. She was not a nurse. Then he wanted to know if it was true, what he had been told, that there are ladies and gentlemen atop who played racquets and hoops and would she please, when they were in Sydney, employ him, for he was good around animals and practical, and would not, not for his life, ma'am, go back to cruel England again. She barely heard him.

She asked him where the hold was. He did not know, but pretended he did. She knew he was lying with his directions, and yet she had the compassion to see him as innocent and herself

Oscar and Lucinda

not so-a beast in heat looking for a beastly game.

She found her way, by mistake, to the engine-room. She did not actually enter, but opened a great riveted door where the fragrance of oil was strongest and, looking down into the giddy steel pit, saw the two giant connecting rods churning round and round, a nightmare from Gargantua, and men, so far below they seemed like smudged ivory dolls, stripped to the waist, with tiny shovels. No one here was playing cards. They stopped and looked up at the intruder. She stepped back and closed the door.

If she had felt this bad in Sydney, she would have cooled her passion by visiting the Chinese. There were no Chinese here.

She did not like the feeling of this ship. It had tossed like a cork in the Bay of Biscay and all those long steel corridors seemed to be painted with the smear of sweat. There was no life in the ship. There had been races for ladies scheduled by a games committee but now it seemed they would not be held, for there were so few ladies on board and most of them not of a racing age. She climbed steel stairs, heading upwards. She passed an officer who blushed to see a woman where he had not expected one. She did not ask him where the hold was. She continued up. She passed a door on the other side of which something improper seemed to be occurring. She came finally to a small kitchen of the tea-and-toast type. There were two doors. She chose the right-hand one. Ahead of her was a red-headed clergyman sitting on a plush red settee. It was the secondclass promenade. She felt herself "nabbed," "caught in the act." She thought it undignified to turn back. She held up her head and straightened her shoulders. She came forward. She walked directly towards him. She introduced herself to him, and when he said his name, she did not hold it.

"I am in the habit," she said, "of making a confession."

"Quite," he said.

"Perhaps this is not a practice you approve of.",

"No, no," he said, "of course not." '

"I wonder, then," she blurted, "if you might oblige me at a time convenient to you." And then, not quite knowing what she had done, and certainly not why, she fled to those regions of the ship where Oscar dare not follow.

The sea looked like a dreary waste of waters. To the east she could see the smudged ambivalence which was Cape Finisterre. The great smokestacks above her head poured forth the contents of the stomach of the ship, black effluent into the chamber of the sky.

Mr Borrodaile of Ultimo and Mr Smith of the Acclimatization Soc«*y In watched the young clergyman. He had sat at the sarrx e place eveay day for fourteen days, and even now when it was warrrx enough tor Mr Borrodaile to set himself up with a hammock on the d&ck, the Gluepot did not move. He would not come up on deck to see Tenerrfe klthough-he admitted it freely-he had never been away f™n Eng and before In Tenerife Harbour he sat exactly as he had m t*e middle of thl B y of Lay, with his Bible on his lap and his lips — Mr Bo^odade noted it first-moving. Mr Borrodaile imagined the parson moved his ^because he readL Bible, but Percy Smith although he though it best to not contest the big fellow's opinion knew the parso*™* be oravine-he was too well educated to read m such a way. (Mr Borro Sho8 was worth ten thousand pounds, moved his lips whe n reading. Mr Smith had seen him do it.) _^ntton "He's a queer one, no doubt," said the *™^«*-**^ chopped, cleft-chinned Mr Borrodaile, the same one wh o had thrown ship's biscuits down the ventilators.