“Horace said that, did he?”
The greengrocer suddenly turned and peered down a stairway.
“Horace!” he yelled, “who’s this here Lucullus you’ve bin gassin’ about?”
A shock–headed boy appeared.
“Loo who?” said he.
Warden departed swiftly.
“My humor does not appeal to Cowes,” he reflected. “I have scored two failures. Having conjured Horace from a coal–cellar let me now confer with Diogenes in his tub.”
Applied to Peter Evans, and his phenomenally small dinghy, the phrase was a happy enough description of the ex–pilot who owned the Nancy. Evans and his craft had gone out of commission together. Both were famous in the annals of Channel pilotage, but an accident had deprived Peter of his left leg, so he earned a livelihood by summer cruising round the coast, and he was now awaiting his present employer at a quay in the river Medina.
But Warden’s pace slackened again, once he was clear of the fruiterer’s shop. Sailing was out of the question until the breeze freshened. It was in his mind to bid Peter meet him again at four o’clock. Meanwhile, he would go to Newport by train, and ramble in Parkhurst Forest for a couple of hours. Recalling that happy–go–lucky mood in later days of storm and stress, he tried to piece together the trivial incidents that were even then conspiring to bring about the great climax of his life. A pace to left or right, a classical quip at his extravagance in the matter of the peaches, a slight hampering of free movement because the Portsmouth ferry–boat happened to be disgorging some hundreds of sightseers into the main street of West Cowes—each of these things, so insignificant, so commonplace, helped to bring him to the one spot on earth where fate, the enchantress, had set her snare in the guise of a pretty girl.
For it was undeniably a pretty face that was lifted to his when a young lady, detaching herself from the living torrent that delayed him for a few seconds on the pavement, appealed for information.