“Oh no. It isn’t here and it isn’t sold. Better than that, it can’t be sold, and I don’t think any one knows where it is. I’m sure I don’t.... And yet more and more wives, on the north side of the square. Observe the virtuous horror of the lions!”
“You may as well explain,” said Torpenhow, and Dick lifted his head from the paper.
“The sea reminded me of it,” he said slowly. “I wish it hadn’t. It weighs some few thousand tons—unless you cut it out with a cold chisel.”
“Don’t be an idiot. You can’t pose with us here,” said the Nilghai.
“There’s no pose in the matter at all. It’s a fact. I was loafing from Lima to Auckland in a big, old, condemned passenger-ship turned into a cargo-boat and owned by a second-hand Italian firm. She was a crazy basket. We were cut down to fifteen ton of coal a day, and we thought ourselves lucky when we kicked seven knots an hour out of her. Then we used to stop and let the bearings cool down, and wonder whether the crack in the shaft was spreading.”
“Were you a steward or a stoker in those days?”
“I was flush for the time being, so I was a passenger, or else I should have been a steward, I think,” said Dick, with perfect gravity, returning to the procession of angry wives. “I was the only other passenger from Lima, and the ship was half empty, and full of rats and cockroaches and scorpions.”
“But what has this to do with the picture?”
“Wait a minute. She had been in the China passenger trade and her lower decks had bunks for two thousand pigtails. Those were all taken down, and she was empty up to her nose, and the lights came through the port holes—most annoying lights to work in till you got used to them. I hadn’t anything to do for weeks. The ship’s charts were in pieces and our skipper daren’t run south for fear of catching a storm. So he did his best to knock all the Society Islands out of the water one by one, and I went into the lower deck, and did my picture on the port side as far forward in her as I could go. There was some brown paint and some green paint that they used for the boats, and some black paint for ironwork, and that was all I had.”
“The passengers must have thought you mad.”