The Lighthearted Quest Read Online Free PDF

up the loading of the
Vidago.
Julia hugged herself. The poor underpaid dockers, always striking for a living wage! Whoever heard of the socalledidle rich hiring private planes and trains nowadays? These views however she kept to herself.
    At length the telephone rang; the passenger manager, at last ‘available’, was on the line.
    â€œOh, Mr. Scales,” said Julia, taking up the instrument—“Miss Probyn here—yes, down at the docks. Why didn’t you let me know that the boat isn’t sailing till tomorrow?”
    Mr. Scales was evasive. Really, he was extremely sorry, but he hadn’t known in time to let her know.
    â€œBut the rain came on, and the men stopped work, at eleven—that meant there wasn’t a hope of getting her out on tonight’s tide,” said Julia inexorably; she had picked up a lot of information over her tea. “I only left home at two. Surely there would have been time?—in three hours?”
    Mr. Scales could almost be heard to wriggle down the telephone. He hadn’t heard quite at eleven o’clock; he really was very sorry it had occurred.
    â€œWell, I call it a very poor show,” said Julia. “Don’t you instruct your dockside staff to keep you informed when this sort of thing happens, so that you can warn your passengers?”
    â€œThat’ll mean a raspberry for me,” muttered the red-haired man, grinning cheerfully, however.
    Mr. Scales meanwhile was asking what Miss Probyn meant to do? Could he do anything to help her?
    â€œI expect so. Have you a car?”
    Yes, Mr. Scales had a car.
    â€œThen you could come and fetch me, couldn’t you, and take me back to the West End?”
    â€œYou’re not thinking of sleeping on board, then?”
    â€œYes, certainly I am—my flat is shut, and I don’t see any point in paying for a room at an hotel because of this muddle,” said Julia firmly. “But I can spend the evening with friends. No, no hurry—so long as I start about six. Right—thank you.” She rang off.
    â€œIt won’t really mean trouble for you, will it?” sheasked the red-haired man. “What time
did
you tell the office?”
    â€œ ‘Bout twelve—and they know damn well up there that if the stevedores go off before twelve they never come back till after the dinner-hour, not if the sun was blazing.”
    â€œScales is new,” said the man in the raincoat. “He doesn’t know the works yet.”
    â€œHave you any idea what time we shall get off tomorrow?” Julia asked him.
    â€œNot much before ten p.m., I’d say.” He turned to consult a dog-eared tide-table which hung on the wall by the window, near which he had remained standing all the time. “No, about ten she should be moving down into the Pool. But they’ll want you on board by nine.”
    â€œOh,
what
a bore!” said Julia. “I did want to go down the river by daylight. Oh, well—and now can I have another call, please?”
    She tried to ring up Mrs. Hathaway, but that lady was out and would be out all the evening. Julia cast about in her mind who to try next: she had said goodbye to everybody, her flat was shut and her maid gone off to relations in the country; she felt as if her life in London had already, for the time being, come to an end. At last she bethought her of someone to whom she hadn’t said goodbye, nor even announced her departure, out of a cowardly desire to avoid what she privately phrased ‘bother’, when she was in a rush of packing and arrangements. For after a hurried routing round among cargo-lines she had come on the
Vidago,
sailing for Tangier in under a week and carrying one passenger; she had seized on this chance, but the ensuing days had been a frenzied scurry of what she called ‘lining-up’ the papers for which she wrote, securing her currency allocation, getting the appropriate visas on her