[CHAPTER XIX]
"HIS WONDERS TO PERFORM"
We had heard of the Honourable "Slope" Carew—pearler, "black-birder," yachtsman and scion of a noble British family—at every port we had touched in the South Pacific, but it was not our fortune to meet him until after our arrival at Suva. There he was one of our first callers, and it chanced that he, with the Captain of H.M.S. Clio and two or three other Englishmen, was off to the yacht for dinner the night a bottle of champagne exploded prematurely in the hands of our Chinese steward and kicked him backwards down the cabin stairs.
"Makes it seem like the old days on the Aphrodite," said Carew, pausing in his stirring narrative of the way in which Bell, a renegade American naval officer, had saved the plague ship, Cora Andrews. "You heard of the Aphrodite in Tahiti, didn't you, and of how her cargo of 'Hum's Extra Spry' helped my old pal, the Reverend Horatio Loveworth, to convert Boraki and his nest of cut-throats on Makatea?"
We had indeed heard the story of the conversion of Boraki and his fellow pirates of Makatea, but never at better than third or fourth hand, and in versions so diametrically at variance that the chance to enjoy the account of one who had actually figured in that famous coup was too good to let slip. We begged Carew, therefore, to let the Cora Andrews yarn go over to another time and to give us the "champagne and missionary" story then and there.
We were dining on deck, and the story, begun over avocados, was continued after we adjourned with coffee and liqueurs to sofa-cushions or lounging chairs in the cockpit. The tropic moon was dropping plummets of gold through the rigging, and, as he talked, Carew punctuated his well-turned sentences with frequent sips from the oft-replenished glass of cracked ice and absinthe on his chair arm. Just how much of the golden floss of the streaming moonlight and the verdant thread of the trickling absinthe were twisted into the yarn he spun, probably Carew himself could not have told.
"It is a long story if I go back to the beginning, as I shall have to if you are to understand all that happened," said Carew musingly; "for from first to last the yarn revolves, not around myself or the Aphrodite or Boraki, but around a special consignment of champagne to which we always referred from the moment its true character began to be revealed as 'Hum's Extra Spry.'
"It was shortly after the pater cut me off with a beggarly five hundred pounds a year at the end of a series of escapades which had culminated with my wrecking his yacht on the coast of Morocco that I found myself in San Francisco. I had sailed my own ninety-footer at Cowes on more than one occasion, so that I was only following the line of least resistance in applying for the billet of first mate when I learned that Colonel Jack Spencer, the mining magnate, had converted a smart sealing schooner into a private yacht and was preparing to sail with a party of friends for the South Pacific. Spencer was rather taken with the idea of having a sprig of British nobility along, and from the first insisted on treating me more as a guest than an under officer. This was how I chanced to be included with the skipper in an invitation to a farewell dinner given by Spencer to a number of San Francisco friends on the eve of our departure. Here I met the members of the yachting party, and, what is of more importance to my story, had my first experience of the potentialities of 'Hum's Extra Spry.'
"Perhaps it will serve to make the strange things which came to pass afterwards more intelligible if I explain here what Spencer only became apprised of six months later through offering his New York wine agent a liberal reward for the information, namely, what put the power in the fancy-priced consignment of champagne he had ordered especially for the South Pacific cruise.
"It appeared that one of the chemists of the great Hum winery at Rheims, in experimenting with a newly-invented aerating powder, had used that mixture instead of the decolourizing solution in tapering off a twelve dozen case order of California champagne that was being hurriedly prepared for re-export to America. Now normal champagne, in the making, exerts so strong a pressure upon the glass which confines it that an average of fully twenty per cent. of the bottles used are burst before the final stage is reached, while the aerating powder which was being tried out as a substitute for carbon-dioxide gas in making sparkling Burgundies and Sauternes was calculated to develop a ten-pounds-to-the-square-inch pressure on its own account. So it happened that every unit of the order in question, having in addition to its normal stock of bubbles those generated as a result of the accidental aeration, was more like a hand grenade than a bottle of wine. Nine-tenths of the lot suffered total disintegration before it was ready to be shipped, and the remainder was only saved by being transferred to rubber-corked bottles of quarter-inch glass, all of the outsides of which were reinforced with a closely-woven mesh of gilded wire. Red enamel grape leaves were grilled into the gold foil of the cap, and the label, in addition to several lines of French attesting the purity of the contents, bore the English words 'Liquid Sunshine—Special,' in raised ivory letters.