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And so the big liner crept on slowly into steaming, oily, pale-green seas, gliding between vividly green islands in the orchid-house temperature of the Malay Peninsula, a part of the world worth visiting, if only to eat the supremely delicious mangosteen, though even an unlimited diet of this luscious fruit would hardly reconcile the average person to a perpetual steam bath, and to an intensely enervating atmosphere.
I hate orchids. The atmosphere of an orchid-house cannot possibly be clean and healthy. One might as well spend one's time in a bacteriological laboratory!" Myra shook her head with affected seriousness. "You must not let Mr. Saunderson hear you," she said. "His orchids are his children. Their very mystery enthrals him and really it is most fascinating.
By that evening one of the large stands was clear, all but a few flowers to keep it from looking blank, and late on the next afternoon Daniel Barnett encountered old Tummus. "Hullo, where are you going with that long barrow?" "Orchid-house, to fetch pots." "What for?" "Muster Grange wants me to help him make up a stand in the zervyturry." Daniel Barnett walked off muttering
Billy made no further contribution to the conversation until he asked some moments later, "Does old Brock ever tell you about his factories, while he's taking you around his orchid-house? There's a man a week killed there, and the foremen tell the girls when they hire them that they aren't expected to take care of themselves on the wages they get!"
James Ellis went straight to the gardens, and had no difficulty in finding Daniel Barnett, whose voice he heard sounding loud, though smothered, in the closely-shut orchid-house, where he was abusing one of the under-gardeners. "I don't care I don't believe it," he cried angrily, as Ellis opened the door slowly; and then came: "Hi! What idiot's that?
And this result of her contacts with Courtier, this 'cacoethes volandi', and feeling of clipped wings, hurt her as being forbidden hurts a child. She remembered how in the housekeeper's room at Monkland there lived a magpie who had once sought shelter in an orchid-house from some pursuer. As soon as they thought him wedded to civilization, they had let him go, to see whether he would come back.
He turned upon his heel and left the orchid-house, and as soon as he was gone the new head-gardener stood watching him till he was out of hearing, and then, doubling up his fist, he struck out from the shoulder at one of the offending pots standing at a corner a lovely mauve-tinted cattleya in full blossom and sent it flying to shivers upon the floor.
"Dunno," replied the boy, "but a hundred yards wants a lot of doing." At, but not into. With that extraordinary magnetic attraction which glass has for the missile of the juvenile thrower, the orchid-house, on the opposite side of the path from the pear-tree, drew the errant stone to its hospitable shelter.
"And the orchid?" "I will see to that," she said. Wedderburn had lost a good deal of blood, but beyond that he had suffered no very great injury. They gave him brandy mixed with some pink extract of meat, and carried him upstairs to bed. His housekeeper told her incredible story in fragments to Dr Haddon. "Come to the orchid-house and see," she said.
Presently they all trooped into the hot-houses warm and fragrant with the smell of freshly-watered earth, and a rather fierce-looking gardener paused in his work to exhibit this or that particular plant in which he took a special interest. But the pride of the rectory was the orchid-house, and insensibly everybody gravitated towards it.
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