The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

“A glass of grog with you, sir,” Hasbro said, handing across the beaker for what might have been the sixth time. I filled my glass and drank it off, realizing as it settled its fiery weight in the pit of my stomach that I was drunk as a lord and with none of the wealth to go with it.

“If we fail, Jacky, don’t expect to see either of us this side of Paradise,” the Professor said. “We’ll be strangers in a filthy strange land.”

“I say,” I said, trying to rise. “What’s this we and you? We’re a company!” My legs, apparently, had turned to jelly, for I remained helplessly in my seat. Hasbro and the Professor donned lead shoes and strode to the hatch, which led below to the ’tween deck, as it were. I tried to throw myself from the loungette, for I saw their intention as clear as rainwater, and I would have damn well followed them but for the physics of leaden rum and leadless shoes.

“Take heart, Jacky boy,” the Professor said. “Let the craft bear you home. Watch for us when the moon is one day past full and Mars rises above the horizon in the early evening.” With that utterance they disappeared through the hatch, and that’s the last I’ve seen of Professor St. Ives and his man Hasbro. I sat like a pudding, stupefied in my chair, listening for a time to a banging and clattering from below. Abruptly there came a lurch and crash and the whirl and swoosh of a great flaming exhalation through the scuttle that bespoke the jettisoning of the forward section. I and my capsule arced away in a trajectory that would ultimately point my prow toward home and the long plunging fall.

Through the glass, as my ship came around on a broad tack, I could see the double aft section hurtling toward the lee shore of Mars, carrying in it two of England’s — aye, of the world’s — greatest men: heroes to the core. I could do nothing but watch in mute wonder as they plunged toward the dark and whirling vortex of the hole. Their ship, now a cone with the top shorn off, broke again in two, the massive lower section towing, if that’s the word, on the end of what appeared to be a long chain of highly polished droplets of metal. The sides of that aft section fell away and tumbled slowly off into the emptiness, baring the massive cork that I had occasion to comment upon previously.

And so, the heavens revolving around her, her conical bowsprit pointed into that gullet of dark mystery, she sailed into temporary oblivion, hauling behind her an incredible cork etched with an equally incredible and, I must say, vastly inspiring legend: “Fitzall Sizes” — a legend that might as easily define the vast capacities of those two forthright and intrepid adventurers.

The Idol’s Eye

I won’t say that this was the final adventure of Professor Langdon St. Ives and his man Hasbro — Colonel Hasbro since the war — but it was certainly the strangest and the least likely of the lot. Consider this: I know the Professor to be a man of complete and utter veracity. If he told me that he had determined, on the strength of scientific discovery, that gravity would reverse itself at four o’clock this afternoon, and that we’d find ourselves, as Stevenson put it, scaling the stars, I’d pack my bag and phone my solicitor and, at 3:59, I’d stroll out into the center of Jermyn Street so as not to crack my head on the ceiling when I floated away. And yet even I would have hesitated, looked askance, perhaps covertly checked the level of the bottles in the Professor’s cabinet if he had simply recounted to me the details of the strange occurrence at the Explorers Club on that third Thursday in April. I admit it the story is impossible on the face of it.

But I was there. And, as I say, what transpired was far and away more peculiar and exotic than the activities that, some twenty years earlier, had set the machinery of fate and mystery into creaking and irreversible motion.

It was a wild and rainy Thursday, then, that day at the club. March hadn’t gone out like any lamb; it had roared right along, storming and blowing into April. We — that is to say, the Professor, Colonel Hasbro, Tubby Frobisher, John Priestly (the African explorer and adventurer, not the novelist), and myself, Jack Owlesby — were sitting about after a long dinner at the Explorers Club, opposite the Planetarium. Wind howled outside the casements, and rain angled past in a driving rush, now letting off, now redoubling, whooshing in great sheets of grey mist. It wasn’t the sort of weather to be out in, you can count on that, and none of us, of course, had any business to see to anyway. I was looking forward to pipes and cigars and a glass of this or that, maybe a bit of a snooze in the lounge and then a really first-rate supper — a veal cutlet, perhaps, or a steak and mushroom pie and a bottle of Burgundy. The afternoon and evening, in other words, held astonishing promise.

So we sipped port, poked at the bowls of our pipes, watched the fragrant smoke rise in little lazy wisps and drift off, and muttered in a satisfied way about the weather. Under those conditions, you’ll agree, it couldn’t rain hard enough. I recall even that Frobisher, who, to be fair, had been coarsened by years in the bush, called the lot of us over to the window in order to have a laugh at the expense of some poor shambling madman who hunched in the rain below, holding over his head the ruins of an umbrella that might have been serviceable twenty or thirty years earlier but had seen hard use since, and which, in its fallen state, had come to resemble a ribby-looking inverted bird with about half a dozen pipe-stem legs. As far as I could see, there was no cloth on the thing at all. He had the mannerisms correct, that much I’ll give him. He seemed convinced that the fossil umbrella was doing the work. Frobisher roared and shook and said that the man should be on the stage. Then he said he had half a mind to go down and give the fellow a half crown, except that it was raining and he would get soaked. “That’s well and good in the bush,” he said, “but in the city, in civilization, well…” He shook his head. “When in Rome,” he said. And he forgot about the poor bogger in the road. All of us did, for a bit.

“I’ve seen rain that makes this look like small beer,” Frobisher boasted, shaking his head. “That’s nothing but fizz-water to me. Drizzle. Heavy fog.”

“It reminds me of the time we faced down that mob in Banju Wangi,” said Priestly, nodding at St. Ives, “after you two” — referring to the Professor and Hasbro — ”routed the pig men. What an adventure.”

It’s moderately likely that Priestly, who kept pretty much to himself, had little desire to tell the story of our adventures in Java, incredible though they were, which had transpired some twenty years earlier. You may have read about them, actually, for my own account was published in The Strand some six months after the story of the Chingford Tower fracas and the alien threat. But as I say, Priestly himself didn’t want to, as the Yanks say, spin any stretchers; he just wanted to shut Frobisher up. We’d heard nothing but “the bush” all afternoon. Frobisher had clearly been “out” in it — Australia, Brazil, India, Canton Province. There was bush enough in the world; that much was certain. We’d had enough of Frobisher’s bush, but of course none of us could say so. This was the club, after all, and Tubby, although coarsened a bit, as I say, was one of the lads.

So I leapt in on top of Priestly when I saw Frobisher point his pipe stem at St. Ives. Frobisher’s pipe stem, somehow, always gave rise to fresh accounts of the ubiquitous bush. “Banju Wangi!” I half shouted. “By golly” I admit it was weak, but I needed a moment to think. And I said it loud enough to put Frobisher right off the scent.

“Banju Wangi,” I said to Priestly. “Remember that pack of cannibals? Inky lot of blokes, what?” Priestly nodded, but didn’t offer to carry on. He was satisfied with simply recalling the rain. And there had been a spectacular rain in those Javanese days, if you can call it a rain. Which you can’t, really, no more than you would call a waterfall a faucet or the sun a gaslamp. A monsoon was what it was.

Roundabout twenty years back, then, it fell out that Priestly and I and poor Bill Kraken had, on the strength of Dr. Birdlip’s manuscript, taken ship to Java where we met, not unexpectedly, Professor St. Ives and Hasbro, themselves returning from a spate of very dangerous and mysterious space travel. The alien threat, as I said before, had been crushed, and the five of us had found ourselves deep in cannibal-infested jungles, beating our way through toward the Bali Straits in order to cross over to Penginuman where there lay, we fervently prayed, a Dutch freighter bound for home. The rain was sluicing down. It was mid-January, smack in the middle of the northwest monsoons, and we were slogging through jungles, trailed by orangutans and asps, hacking at creepers, and slowly metamorphosing into biped sponges.

On the banks of the Wangi River we stumbled upon a tribe of tiny Peewatin natives and traded them boxes of kitchen matches for a pair of long piroques. Bill Kraken gave his pocket watch to the local shaman in return for an odd bamboo umbrella with a shrunken head dangling from the handle by a brass chain. Kraken was, of course, round the bend in those days, but his purchase of the curious umbrella wasn’t an act of madness. He stayed far