The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

into an envelope on her breakfast plate…That made her happy again. She liked to see that in a man, and said that she was anxious to meet the young lady. When I glanced across the room there wasn’t any elephant, of course, or anything like it.

I don’t doubt that you’re going to ask me why I didn’t just inquire about the woman and her son, who carried a rubber elephant with enormous ears. There would have been a hundred friendly ways to phrase it. Well, I didn’t. I still felt like half a fool for having blundered back in like that and going through the song and dance about the breakfast plate, and I was almost certain by then that I hadn’t seen anything at all, that I had invented it out of the curve of a leaf and the edge of a pot. It was a little farfetched, wasn’t it? Just as it had seemed improbable to the captain of the downed ship that the nonsense in his log ought to be taken seriously.

I had imagined it, and I told myself so as I set out toward the pier again, where, just like that, I nearly ran over old Parsons, the secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences, coming along with a bamboo pole and creel in his hand, got up in a woolen sort of fishing uniform and looking as if even though he mightn’t catch a single fish, at least he had got the outfit right, and that qualified him, as the scriptures put it, to walk with the proud.

I was surprised to see him. He was thoroughly disappointed to see me. It was the company I kept. He assumed straight off that St. Ives was lurking somewhere about, and that meant, of course, that the business of the Royal Academy was being meddled in again. And he was right. His being there said as much. It was an altogether unlikely coincidence. If I had looked at it from the angle of a practicing detective, then I’d have had suspicions about his angling outfit, and I’d have concluded that he was trying too hard to play a part. He was up to something, to be sure.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

I gave him a jolly look, and said, “Down on holiday, actually. And you, going fishing?”

Foolish question, I guess, given what he looked like, but that didn’t call for him to get cheeky. “I’m prospecting,” he said, and held up his bamboo pole. “This is an alchemical divining rod, used to locate fishes with coins in their bellies.”

But just then, when I was going to say something clever, up came a gentleman in side whiskers and interrupted in order to wring Parsons’s hand. “Dreadfully sorry, old man,” he said to Parsons. “But he was tired, and he’d lived a long life. Very profitable. I’m happy you could come down for the funeral.”

Parsons took him by the arm and led him away down the pier pretty briskly, as if to get him away from me before he said anything more. He had already said enough, though, hadn’t he? This man Piper was dead, and Parsons had come down to see him buried.

It was a full morning, taken all the way around. There was a half hour yet before I was to meet St. Ives and Hasbro back at the Apple. I was feeling very much like a detective by then, although I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was I had detected, besides this last bit. I decided that wasn’t enough, and went across toward the ramshackle icehouse, a wooden sort of warehouse in a weedy lot not far off the ocean.

I went in at a side door without knocking. The place was cold, not surprisingly, and I could hear the hiss of steam from the compressors. The air was tinged with the smell of ammonia and wet straw. The jolly captain wasn’t hard to find; he confronted me as soon as I came in through the door. He seemed to be the only one around, and he was big, and he talked with an accent, stretching out his vowels as if they were made of putty. I won’t try to copy it, since I’m no good at tricking up accents, but he was full of words like tarnation and fleabit and hound dog and ain’t and talked altogether in a sort of apostrophic “Out West” way that struck me as out of character in a sea captain. I expected something salty and maritime. I made a mental note of it.

That was after I had shaken his hand and introduced my self. “I’m Abner Benbow,” I said, thinking this up on the spot and almost saying “Admiral Benbow,” but stopping myself just in time. “I’m in the ice trade, up in Harrogate. They call me ‘Cool Abner Benbow,’” I said, “but they don’t call me a cold fish.” I inclined my head just a little, thinking that maybe this last touch was taking it too far. But he liked it, saying he had a “monicker” too.

“Call me Bob,” he said, “Country Bob Bowker. Call me anythin’ you please, but don’t call me too late for dinner.” And with that admonition he slammed me on the back with his open hand and nearly knocked me through the wall. He was convulsed with laughter, wheezing and looking apoplectic, as if he had just that moment made up the gag and was listening to himself recite it for the first time. I laughed too, very heartily, I thought, wiping pretended tears from my eyes.

“You’re a Yank,” I said. And that was clever, of course, because it rather implied that I didn’t already know who he was, despite his recent fame.

“That’s a fact. Wyoming man, born and bred. Took to the sea late and come over here two years ago just to see how the rest of the world got on. I was always a curious man. And I was all alone over there, runnin’ ferries out of Frisco over to Sarsleeto, and figured I wouldn’t be no more alone over here.”

No more than any common criminal, I thought, assuming straight off, and maybe unfairly, that there was more to Captain Bowker’s leaving America than he let on. I nodded, though, as if I thought all his nonsense very sage indeed.

“Been here long?” I asked, nonchalant.

He gave me a look. “Didn’t I just say two year?”

“I mean here, at the icehouse.”

“Ah!” he said, suddenly jolly again. “No. Just got on. If you’d of come day before yesterday you wouldn’t have found me. Old man who ran the place up and died, though. Pitched over like he was poisoned, right there where you’re a-standing now, up and pitched over, and there I was an hour later, looking in at the door with my hat in my hands. I knew a little about it, being mechanical and having lived by the sea, so I was a natural. They took me right on. What’s all that to you?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” I said, realizing right off that I shouldn’t have said it twice; there was no room here to sound jumpy. But he had caught me by surprise with the question, and all I could think to say next, rather stupidly, was, “Up and died?” thinking that the phrase was a curious one, as if he had done it on purpose, maybe got up out of a chair to do it.

You can see that I had got muddled up. This wasn’t going well. Somehow I had excited his suspicions by saying the most arbitrary and commonplace things. Captain Bowker was another lunatic, I remember thinking — the sort who, if you passed him on the street and said good-morning, would squint at you and ask what you meant by saying such a thing.

“Dropped right over dead on his face,” said Captain Bowker, looking at me just as seriously as a stone head.

Then he grinned and broke into laughter, slapping me on the back again. “Cigar?” he asked.

I waved it away. “Don’t smoke. You have one. I like the smell of tobacco, actually. Very comfortable.”

He nodded and said, “Drives off the ’monia fumes,” and then he gnawed off the end of a fat cigar, spitting out the debris with about twice the required force.

“So,” I said. “Mind if I look around?”

“Yep,” he said.

I started forward, but he stepped in front of me. “Yep,” he said again, talking past his cigar. “I do mind if you look around.” Then he burst into laughter again so that there was no way on earth that I could tell what he minded and what he didn’t mind.

He plucked the unlit cigar out of his mouth and said, “Maybe tomorrow, Jim. Little too much going on today. Too busy for it. I’m new and all, and can’t be showing in every Dick and Harry.” He managed, somehow, to get me turned around and propelled toward the door. “You understand. You’re a businessman. Tomorrow afternoon, maybe, or the next day. That’s soon enough, ain’t it? You ain’t going nowhere. Come on back around, and you can have the run of the place. Bring a spyglass and a measure stick.”

And with that I was out in the fog again, wondering exactly how things had gone so bad. In the space of ten minutes I’d been Abner and Jim and Dick and Harry, but none of us had seen a thing. At least I hadn’t given myself away, though. Captain Bowker couldn’t have guessed who I really was. I could relate the incident to St. Ives and Hasbro without any shame, There was enough in the captain’s manner to underscore any suspicions that we might already have had of the man, and there was the business of his not wanting me to see the workings of the icehouse, innocent as such workings ought to be.