The Riddle of the Sands | Page 9

were as well known as the Bank of
England or the Stores, instead of specializing in 'rigging-screws',
whatever they might be. They sounded important, though, and it would

be only polite to unearth them. I connected them with the 'few repairs'
and awoke new misgivings. At the Stores I asked for a No. 3
Rippingille stove, and was confronted with a formidable and hideous
piece of ironmongery, which burned petroleum in two capacious tanks,
horribly prophetic of a smell of warm oil. I paid for this miserably,
convinced of its grim efficiency, but speculating as to the domestic
conditions which caused it to be sent for as an afterthought by telegram.
I also asked about rigging-screws in the yachting department, but learnt
that they were not kept in stock; that Carey and Neilson's would
certainly have them, and that their shop was in the Minories, in the far
east, meaning a journey nearly as long as to Flensburg, and twice as
tiresome. They would be shut by the time I got there, so after this
exhausting round of duty I went home in a cab, omitted dressing for
dinner (an epoch in itself), ordered a chop up from the basement
kitchen, and spent the rest of the evening packing and writing, with the
methodical gloom of a man setting his affairs in order for the last time.
The last of those airless nights passed. The astonished Withers saw me
breakfasting at eight, and at 9.30 I was vacantly examining
rigging-screws with what wits were left me after a sulphurous ride in
the Underground to Aldgate. I laid great stress on the 3/8's, and the
galvanism, and took them on trust, ignorant as to their functions. For
the eleven-shilling oilskins I was referred to a villainous den in a back
street, which the shopman said they always recommended, and where a
dirty and bejewelled Hebrew chaffered with me (beginning at 18s.)
over two reeking orange slabs distantly resembling moieties of the
human figure. Their odour made me close prematurely for 14s., and I
hurried back (for I was due there at eleven) to my office with my two
disreputable brown-paper parcels, one of which made itself so
noticeable in the close official air that Carter attentively asked if I
would like to have it sent to my chambers, and K--was inquisitive to
bluntness about it and my movements. But I did not care to enlighten
K--, whose comments I knew would be provokingly envious or
wounding to my pride in some way.
I remembered, later on, the prismatic compass, and wired to the

Minories to have one sent at once, feeling rather relieved that I was not
present there to be cross-examined as to size and make.
The reply was, 'Not stocked; try surveying-instrument maker'--a reply
both puzzling and reassuring, for Davies's request for a compass had
given me more uneasiness than anything, while, to find that what he
wanted turned out to be a surveying-instrument, was a no less
perplexing discovery. That day I made my last _précis_ and handed
over my schedules--Procrustean beds, where unwilling facts were
stretched and tortured--and said good-bye to my temporary chief,
genial and lenient M--, who wished me a jolly holiday with all
sincerity.
At seven I was watching a cab packed with my personal luggage and
the collection of unwieldy and incongruous packages that my shopping
had drawn down on me. Two deviations after that wretched prismatic
compass--which I obtained in the end secondhand, faute de mieux, near
Victoria, at one of those showy shops which look like jewellers' and are
really pawnbrokers'--nearly caused me to miss my train. But at 8.30 I
had shaken off the dust of London from my feet, and at 10.30 1 was, as
I have announced, pacing the deck of a Flushing steamer, adrift on this
fatuous holiday in the far Baltic.
An air from the west, cooled by a midday thunderstorm, followed the
steamer as she slid through the calm channels of the Thames estuary,
passed the cordon of scintillating lightships that watch over the
sea-roads to the imperial city like pickets round a sleeping army, and
slipped out into the dark spaces of the North Sea. Stars were bright,
summer scents from the Kent cliffs mingled coyly with vulgar
steamer-smells; the summer weather held Immutably. Nature, for her
part, seemed resolved to be no party to my penance, but to be
imperturbably bent on shedding mild ridicule over my wrongs. An
irresistible sense of peace and detachment, combined with that
delicious physical awakening that pulses through the nerve-sick
townsman when city airs and bald routine are left behind him,
combined to provide me, however thankless a subject, with a solid
background of resignation. Stowing this safely away, I could calculate

my intentions with cold egotism. If the weather