Nevertheless, the fever heightened. The light-system of the Boodah, now included in the usual alphabetical lists of derelicts, was conned by thousands of mariners, while in the crowded captains', underwriters', and committee rooms at Lloyd's discussion buzzed and speechified in every tone of gravity. Suddenly in the F. G. and S. clause marine insurance underwent a profound modification; and it was then that the millionaire, Schroeder, at that time a German clerk in the City, managed to borrow five thousand pounds, and quickly cleared his pile by underwriting on larger F. C. and S. terms. And again raged the sale of the islands as penny salt-cellars, finger-basins, etc.; in broker's and sub-editor's office the tape-machine clicked the hourly progress of preparations at Spezzia; while every by-street was dreadful with that music-hall chorus:
“To Spezzia runs the Pullman train;
The Follies soon their sense will teach;
We've Beech, O dear, upon the brain,
He brains upon the beach”.
Meantime, the question of the drawing-room was “Are you going to Spezzia?” and by the 7th so great a pilgrimage of tourists—experts, idlers, cinematographers, special correspondents, ministers of state, Yankees, officers, social stars—had flocked to the scene, that accommodation failed in the town and surrounding hill-country, from Le Grazie on the west, to Lerici on the east of the Gulf.
The morning dawned bright—Italian sky, tranquil Italian sea—and by nine the harbour was alive with small-craft and Portovenere steamboats, all gala with flags; on the land side, too, over the hills, up the old road called Giro della Foce, and before the villages commanding the town, spread a cloud of witnesses; while the multitude in possession of permessos for the dock-region stretched across a hundred and sixty acres, perched on every coign, and murmuring like the sea.
And all in the air a fluttered consciousness of the to-come, the present nothing, an hour hence everything—like the suspense of nature before gales, and that greatness and novelty of marriage-mornings: for such a bride that day would rush to the brine as it had never embraced.
There lay the hulk, all nuptial in colours, her roof looking like a plaza of Lima or La Paz at Carnival, flags in mountain-ridges round her edges, flags in festoons, in slanting clothes-lines, in trophy-groups, on bandroled poles, bedecking her; some scaffolding still round her; and three running derricks, capable of wielding guns and boilers of 140 tons, craned their shears about her. A temporary stair under flags ran right up to a ledge above the waterline: from which ledge little steel steps led here and there to the roof; round the edge of roof and ledge running two balustrades, surrounding the hulk; and over that upper portion, four times repeated in white letters ten feet high, the name BOODAH boomed itself.
By eleven some seven hundred people stood and sat on the roof—the élite of Europe, invited to the luncheon after the launch, seeming to the tract of on-lookers quite dainty and visionary there, like objects mirrored in an eye. And they formed groups, of which some chatted, and were elegant, and some spoke the gravest words uttered for centuries.
“What, really, is the Boodah?” asked a Servian Minister of a French: “is she a whim, a threat, or a tool?”
“She is too heavy for a whim”, answered the French, “too dear for a threat, and too fantastic for a tool. Time will show”.
But this was no answer at all: something more to the point came from a multitudinous tumult of sledges below—the workmen “wedging-up”.