Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household Page B

minister or both and never get nearer to Class X than being directed to the Saloon Bar if he enters the Public.
    I worry with this analysis in the hope of hitting on some new method of effacing my identity. When I speak a foreign language I can disguise my class, background, and nationality without effort, but when I speak English to an Englishman I am at once spotted as a member of X. I want to avoid that, and if the class could be defined I might know how.
    Mr Vaner received me in his cabin. He was a dashing young man in his early twenties, with his cap on the back of a head of brown curls. His tiny stateroom was well hung with feminine photographs, some cut from the illustrated weeklies, some personally presented and inscribed in various languages. He evidently drove himself hard on land as well as sea.
    As soon as we had shaken hands, he said:
    ‘Haven’t met you before, have I?’
    ‘No. I got your name from one of the hands. I hear you are sailing tomorrow.’
    ‘Well?’ he asked guardedly.
    I handed him my passport.
    ‘Before we go any further, I want you to satisfy yourself that I am British and really the person I pretend to be.’
    He looked at my passport, then up at my face and eyeshade.
    ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘Take a seat, won’t you? You seem to have been in trouble, sir.’
    ‘I have, by God! And I want to get out of it.’
    ‘A passage? If it depended on me, but I’m afraid the old man …’
    I told him that I didn’t want a passage, that I wouldn’t put so much responsibility on either him or the captain; all I wanted was a safe place to stow away.
    He shook his head and advised me to try a liner.
    ‘I daren’t risk it,’ I answered. ‘But show me where to hide, and I give you my word of honour that no one shall see me during the voyage or when I go ashore.’
    ‘You had better tell me a little more,’ he said.
    He threw himself back in his chair and cocked one leg over the other. His face assumed a serious and judicial air, but his delightfully swaggering pose showed that he was enjoying himself.
    I spun him a yarn which, so far as it went, was true. I told him that I was in deadly trouble with the authorities, that I had come down the river in a boat, and that an appeal to our consul was quite useless.
    ‘I might put you in the store-room,’ he said doubtfully. ‘We’re going home in ballast, and there’s nowhere in the hold for you to hide.’
    I suggested that the store-room was too dangerous, that I didn’t want to take the remotest chance of being seen and getting the ship into trouble. That seemed to impress him.
    ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘if you can stand it, there’s an empty freshwater tank which we never use, and I could prop up the cover so that you’d get some air. But I expect that you’ve slept in worse places, sir, now that I come to think of it.’
    ‘You recognized my name?’
    ‘Of course. I wouldn’t do this for anyone.’
    All the same I think he would, given a story that appealed to him.
    I asked when I could come aboard.
    ‘No time like the present! I don’t know who’s down in the engine-room, but there’s nobody on deck except the cook. I’ll just deal with the cops!’
    He waited till the couple of police had walked two hundred yards up the wharf and then started waving and shouting good-bye as if someone had just gone away between the warehouses. The two looked round and continued their stroll; they had no reason to doubt that a visitor left the ship while they had their backs to her.
    Mr Vaner sent the cook ashore to buy a bottle of whisky.
    ‘You’ll need something to mix with your water,’ he chuckled, immensely pleased that he had now committed himself to the adventure, ‘and I don’t want him around while I open up the tank. You wait here and make yourself comfortable.’
    I asked him what I had better say if anyone came aboard unexpectedly and found me in his cabin.
    ‘Say? Oh, tell ’em you’re her father!’ He