Captains Stupendous Read online

  At last he believed he had some sort of answer.

  By this time, Captain Nullity had been given enough money by Hugo Bloat to buy a new ship, and he was busy with the futile task of searching the high seas for the lost refrigeration machine. He never expected to find it, and he never did, but he enjoyed the work nonetheless. The sea was his soul, the sting of salt spray on his skin made him feel more alive than any breeze on land, however sweet or soft.

  Captain Nullity makes no further appearance in my tale, but a different sailor of similar type does. I learned later that the oceans are the stage for unexpected deeds of all kinds, good and bad; and that such men as Nullity play a crucial part in the fate of the waves, symbolically speaking, though they are a dying breed. The name of that other sailor is Scipio Faraway and it may even be a familiar one to you.

  The Airshow

  I had the privilege of meeting Scipio Faraway some years earlier, at the Brescia airshow in 1909. I was attending in my professional capacity as a journalist and I was somewhat disappointed by the event; the endless wait while mechanics repaired the primitive flying machines was tedious. I was an ambitious soul back then. Years later I learned that a clerk by the name of Franz Kafka was also present; he would turn himself into one of the finest and most disturbing writers of the century. I believe he wrote a short text about the airshow itself.

  It was when Bleriot was throwing an understandable tantrum over yet another delay to the fixing of his engine that I turned to leave and walked into a man standing directly behind. The blow stunned me and I couldn’t repress a curse.

  ‘Cachu planciau!’

  Almost immediately, the stranger recited a short verse I hadn’t heard since my childhood. I was amazed.

  ‘You understand Welsh!’ I cried in disbelief.

  ‘Yes: the language of Merlin.’

  I was amused by the eccentricity of this comment and offered him my apologies for the impact, though it had damaged my senses more than his, and in fact he seemed completely untroubled. I explained that I was in a permanent rush due to the incessant demands of my editor and that work pressure had made me clumsy; it was a feeble excuse for barging straight into a person and I blushed when I had finished giving it. But he betrayed no flicker of impatience or scorn.

  In fact he shook my hand. ‘Lloyd Griffiths,’ I said.

  He smiled and winked at me.

  ‘Rarely are journalists to be trusted, but I do like the look of you. You work for a London newspaper?’

  I laughed. ‘Nothing so fancy. The Western Mail. It’s Welsh and based in Cardiff; my destiny and desire is to write for people who have little or no respect for the King of England.’

  He bowed slightly and grinned broadly.

  ‘My father was originally from Wales,’ he said, ‘and went across the sea to Gascony to work and marry. He was responsible enough, but in his heart he was a wanderer, and that’s where I get my own wanderlust. I’m here in Brescia only briefly.’

  ‘What do you think of the airshow?’ I asked.

  Scipio Faraway adjusted his cap thoughtfully and gazed across the field at the spectators and the flying contraptions near the sheds. I followed his eyes and saw the American pilot Glenn Curtiss, feet propped on an empty gasoline tin, reading a newspaper, while his mechanics fuelled his craft, a display of incredible nonchalance.

  ‘I like it. There’s much potential here. But the man I came to see didn’t turn up, as it happens. It’s a pity.’

  ‘You have a favourite aviator?’ I pressed.

  He answered quietly, ‘Yes, there’s one inventor I’m keen to observe, a maverick. It seems he’s developing an entirely new method of propulsion and was supposed to make his debut today, but clearly his system isn’t yet ready; maybe at the next airshow?’

  ‘You came to Brescia especially for that?’

  He shook his head. ‘I was passing through Italy anyway. I’ll stay until the judges choose between Curtiss, Bleriot or Rougier for the awarding of the Grand Prix. Then I’ll move on.’

  ‘And where will your next destination be?’

  A distant look came over him and he shrugged slightly. ‘I don’t know. France, Tunisia, the Antilles, China, India … I’ll go wherever the currents of life take me; those can’t be resisted.’

  I wondered how many other currents he had successfully resisted, how many storms and whirlpools and waterspouts he had beaten and escaped, how many undersea volcanoes, tidal waves, thunderbolts he had cheated. Suddenly I was seized by a powerful envy; this enigmatic sailor, with his black pea coat, unshaven chin and hypnotic eyes, had made me oddly and profoundly dissatisfied with my own present condition. I told myself that a romantic lifestyle of endless wandering wasn’t, in reality, so fine a thing, but nonetheless I was deeply affected.

  ‘Maybe I ought to interview you one day?’ I suggested. ‘I’m sure you have many incredible stories to tell?’

  He bowed politely and smiled, but without a great deal of enthusiasm, and I understood that unlike so many similar characters I had met during my career, he wasn’t obsessed with fame. Whatever it was that burned so fiercely inside him, that kept him moving from place to place, it wasn’t a desire to be recognised or acclaimed.

  ‘If our paths ever cross again,’ he conceded.

  ‘That’s at the discretion of fate,’ I said with a cough of embarrassment and a small blush, for I generally prefer to avoid invoking supernatural or poetic forces; but he smiled again, more broadly this time, idly scratched the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other and looked up at a blue sky unsullied by buzzing aircraft.

  ‘Fate or the man who makes his own.’

  I considered these words and found them unanswerable. ‘Good luck to you, sir,’ was my response, ‘but if you’ll excuse me, I must telephone my editor to file my latest report, though in truth nothing much has happened in the past few hours. I managed to get a glimpse of Puccini, but I fear my readers won’t care much about that.’

  ‘The Welsh are a musical nation, though,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed. Goodbye, Monsieur!’

  ‘Farewell, Mr Griffiths. It was a pleasure.’

  I shook his hand and was again impressed with the strength of his grip, but when he lowered it I noticed a deep scar on his palm. He had inflicted this on himself while still a boy, with a pair of scissors, after being told by a fortune-teller that he had no fate line; I learned all this much later. That’s the sort of person he was. Even then he had judged it appropriate to gouge his own destiny into his own flesh.

  The Bicycle

  The years passed and I thrived as a reasonably successful journalist. After the Brescia Airshow most of my assignments were on my home soil, but I sometimes visited other countries to report on various events or disasters my editor believed might interest our readership. Few of those occasions had glamour or excitement, but the circulation of The Western Mail kept increasing, so clearly my editor was no fool. In 1910 I voyaged to Greece and Denmark; in 1911 I was nearly sent to Albania to cover the rebellion against the Ottomans but fell sick before departure. I had picked up a rare fungal infection. The journalist who went in my place ended up with his head hung on the wall of a minor warlord.

  War correspondence wasn’t my usual duty; I interviewed eccentric or visionary personalities in an ongoing series of character studies. The fact is that my newspaper was becoming more sensational in tone; there was some foolish notion by the owners of imitating the New York Herald and creating news for its own sake, however irresponsible the result: most of the lunatics I interviewed were harmless enough and those who weren’t generally lacked the means to cause harm in the world. Curiously one of them turned out to be a man who believed he had developed a propulsion system that could vastly improve the performance of aeroplanes. In truth he was a fraud, but a rather amusing one.

  His propulsion system involved a pilot dropping grenades into a chute that would roll them into a combustion chamber at the rear of his aircraft. The detonatio
ns would push the vehicle forward with jerks of increasing force. The inventor’s name was Rolfe and I believed he was related to an author of the same name. After listening to his explanations for hours and finally asking to inspect the models he claimed he had successfully flown, he finally admitted his work was theory alone. I turned to leave in disgust but he tried to recapture my attention with an improvised demonstration. I was astonished when he began rummaging in a crate for a grenade. Then he urged me to step out into his garden.

  He had a bicycle there and he rigged up a combustion chamber from a length of drainpipe that he shortened with a hacksaw and tied to the frame with cable. Before I was able to protest at his lunacy, he had mounted the bicycle and inserted the grenade in the pipe. The blast erupted with equal pressure from both ends and he moved neither forward nor backward, but the rusty bicycle shivered to bits. He collapsed in the middle of a pile of metal debris, cogs rolling around him, while I shook with silent laughter. Yet he wasn’t dismayed by this failure. He insisted the principle was good and that the application alone was at fault.

  ‘After all,’ he pointed out, ‘the pulse system worked well for Wiberg.’

  I frowned. Since my chance meeting with Scipio Faraway I’d forgotten that he had gone to Brescia for the sake of meeting a maverick inventor. I wondered if this ‘Wiberg’ was the same one. It wasn’t, for he was already dead, of course, and in fact had expired in 1905; but that was something I only learned much later. Even journalists can be guilty of failing to put all the right questions at the right time.

  ‘Who is Wiberg?’ I asked Rolfe, as he stood and brushed himself with his fingers, his trousers glittering with splinters of iron from the shattered bicycle. He licked his lips and said:

  ‘Martin Wiberg. Swedish inventor. The few people who have heard of him conclude that his greatest contribution to civilisation is a device that can print logarithmic tables; but in my opinion he should be better known for the pulsejet engine. It’s a vessel with a valved intake and open outlet; air flows through the intake and is mixed with fuel, then the valve is shut and the mixture ignited. The explosion pushes the gas through the exhaust pipe, moving the engine forward.’

  ‘Then the valve opens again to allow more air in?’

  ‘Exactly! The thrust is pulsed.’

  ‘I imagine the system makes a great deal of noise?’

  ‘Unfortunately that is so.’

  ‘And he fitted one to an aeroplane, did he?’

  Rolfe shook his head emphatically. ‘Such an engine would be far too bulky and heavy for any existing airframe to support. An aircraft powered by a pulsejet would never leave the ground. That’s the entire point of my own simplified system, which in essence is a recoilless gun that utilises a regular input of self-contained energy packets, thus avoiding the need for an automatic fuel injection mechanism. Odd how making a system easier can prove to be such a headache!’

  I grinned with sympathy at the irony of that.

  ‘Will you ever find an aviator brave enough to risk flying an aeroplane with a pocket of grenades?’ I wondered, but I already knew there would be no shortage of volunteers. We live in an age of wonders and dangers, a time of new myths and challenges.

  He didn’t need to answer. And although I had decided to write a comic piece about Mr Jason Rolfe and his bicycle experiment, I had no intention of mocking him; the humour would be compassionate, for though I didn’t share his specific vision I admired his spirit. His dream never bore fruit in subsequent years, but at the very least he had fuelled my own dreams and nightmares with engines that pushed gleaming aircraft through clear skies at rates of speed almost unimaginable!

  A week or so later, an iceberg struck the White Star liner RMS Titanic with the loss of 1513 lives. I was as appalled as everyone else, but I never guessed my destiny was intimately linked to it, nor that the paths of Scipio Faraway and I would cross again in the wake of a maritime disaster more incredible in form if not in scale.

  The Sailor On Land

  As for Scipio, he had left Brescia on foot, walking over the Alps with that long, easy stride of his, his head held high and his eyes fixed on whatever star burned most brightly above the jagged peaks. Where there was no path, he made his own, resting from storms in the abandoned huts of shepherds, dreaming of past exploits and adventures to come while the wind swirled the snowflakes outside. On full moon nights he climbed in the silvery glimmer until dawn and greeted the sunrise by doffing his cap and bowing with old-fashioned grace.

  How many lonely suns had risen and set in those enigmatic eyes? For a man who never stopped wandering, collecting new horizons with every day that passed, the crisp heights of the mountains were no less familiar than the broad blue deeps; and the mists that shrouded the summits, quite as breathable as the vapours of the steaming jungles, held no terrors. The oceans of snow and ice might be sailed and explored to their limits. From the crests of the huddle of brooding stone giants he gazed down at France, where the scent of blooms awaited him.

  Within a month he could have been in Paris, but he lingered awhile in the forests of the Bourgogne, at the insistence of a girl he met there. Scipio never gave away his heart on a whim, nor did he ever exploit the feelings of others, but he was a man who loved women, and they loved him. Even an individual who carves his own fate must acknowledge a higher power at irregular times of life. At last he left for the capital and briefly took up residence there, among the bohemians. Down grey rivers that were streets he strolled, his coat billowing like a sail.

  It is difficult for me not to daydream of this abstruse figure ascending the fabled steps of Montmartre, sipping absinthe in a tiny café or tapping a foot to the wild melodies of itinerant musicians. But did he ever think of the humble journalist he met once in a field in Italy? I doubt it.

  In Paris he found what he sought; then he left for more exotic climes, for the tangled forests of West Africa, and because he was a man who hated injustice he ended up in a rebel village in Sierra Leone, the home of fugitive workers who had been treated worse than slaves.

  He helped to ambush the trackers that had been hired to slaughter the fugitives, and the grateful villagers gave him a diamond for his trouble, but such objects meant little to him. Then he walked due north out of the forest, and between the brooding ruins of the ancient Songhai kingdoms, and over the dunes, and across the pastures of the Tuareg nomads where wine is drunk only in secret and belief in genies is considered good sense; and in the shade of an oasis he failed yet again to read his favourite book, Voltaire’s Candide, right to the end.

  The Collector

  My editor said to me one morning, ‘Today I want you to pay a visit to a certain Hugo Bloat of Porthcawl. He’s one of the richest men in Wales, a rather mysterious individual who—’

  I lifted a hand to cut short the description. Ben Gordon, my editor, had a tendency to speak for hours without pause. ‘I know who he is and what he does, at least some of it; but he’s notoriously protective of his privacy and doesn’t deal with journalists.’

  ‘That’s why it’s your lucky day, Lloyd. He has agreed to give his first ever interview to us, to The Western Mail. It seems he wants a chance to protest against, and possibly refute, certain slanders that are in circulation about his tastes and inclinations. Some ignorant peasants insist he dabbles in black magic; others in smuggling.’

  ‘And what’s your opinion of him?’ I asked.

  Gordon smirked. ‘I suspect he does both. Yes, Hugo Bloat, wickedest man in the country, an obscene experimenter with dark voodoo magic and a consumer of contraband goods. He sent me a cask of strong Haitian rum to win my affection, and it worked.’

  ‘You want him to appear in a positive light?’

  ‘Come now, Lloyd, I won’t go that far. You are free to pursue the truth to the best of your ability. All I’m saying is that you must embark on your interview without any preconceived ideas about this reclusive man. So it will serve everyone best, including the reading public, if you adopt
an air of extreme neutrality in his presence.’

  ‘That’s one of the most cynical things I’ve heard.’

  He grinned. ‘Hasn’t your fungal infection cleared up yet? There’s still a rather strange odour about you.’

  ‘My condition is incurable; but it doesn’t hinder my work.’

  ‘Wonderful. Off you go, then!’

  I smarted. Lloyd Griffiths, journalist without integrity … That was the person I saw when I stared into the mirror. But I did my duty and felt the thrill of anticipation as I did so, for any opportunity to get closer to Hugo Bloat had to be exploited to full advantage.

  My editor had provided me with a motorcar and I drove through the mist to the isolated mansion of Mr Bloat, overlooking the sand dunes to the east of Porthcawl, a journey that took several hours down the unsurfaced roads. I assumed the owner was expecting me, but I rang his front doorbell without result. Didn’t he keep any servants on the premises?

  At last I was forced to skirt the house and seek an alternative entry. I was surprised by the odour of decay that seeped from the building. Some of the cracks and fissures in the outer walls were wide enough for me to peer inside rooms; they were invariably stuffed with mouldy furniture or decaying books. At last I found an open door at the rear and stepped into a narrow hallway floored with boards that creaked horribly. A thin voice from somewhere above floated down:

  ‘Is that you, Tom? Come upstairs at once!’

  I frowned and called back, ‘No, this is Mr Griffiths from The Western Mail. I’m here to interview Mr Bloat.’

  ‘Ah yes! How unfortunate! I had forgotten!’