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Suppose we wait till we get to London? he said. Zuyland, by the way, had torn up his account and thrown it overboard that morning early. His reasons were my reasons. In the train Keller began to revise his copy, and every time that he looked at the trim little fields, the red villas, and the embankments of the line, the blue pencil plunged remorselessly through the slips.
Zuyland took a heavy column and a half, giving approximate lengths and breadths, and the whole list of the crew whom he had sworn on oath to testify to his facts. There was nothing fantastic or flamboyant in Zuyland. I wrote three-quarters of a leaded bourgeois column, roughly speaking, and refrained from putting any journalese into it for reasons that had begun to appear to me.
I sniffed, for there was a poisonous rank smell in the cold air a smell that I had smelt before. 'If I was on land I should say that it was an alligator. It smells like musk, I answered. 'Not ten thousand alligators could make that smell' said Zuyland; 'I have smelt them. 'Bewitched! Bewitched! said Frithiof. 'The sea she is turned upside down, and we are walking along the bottom.
'Stop, you'll bite your thumb off, I said, and Keller laughed brokenly as he picked up his cigar. Only Zuyland, leaning over the port bulwarks, seemed self-possessed. He declared later that he was very sick. 'We've seen it, he said, turning round. 'That is it. 'What? said Keller, chewing the unlighted cigar.
'You don't seem to appreciate the beauty of our scoop. It's pyramidal the death of the sea-serpent! Good heavens alive, man, it's the biggest thing ever vouchsafed to a paper! 'Curious to think that it will never appear in any paper, isn't it? 'I said. Zuyland was near me, and he nodded quickly. 'What do you mean? said Keller. 'If you're enough of a Britisher to throw this thing away, I shan't.
By this time Zuyland, Keller, and myself had caught something of Frithiof's excitement, for any emotion on shipboard is most contagious. The captain ran out of his cabin, spoke to Frithiof, looked at the log-line, jumped on the bridge, and in a minute we felt the steamer swing round as Frithiof turned her. ''Going back to Cape Town? said Keller.
Ten minutes after Keller spoke to me, as the Rathmines cleared Cape Town, I had forgotten the aloofness I desired to feign, and was in heated discussion on the immorality of expanding telegrams beyond a certain fixed point. Then Zuyland came out of his cabin, and we were all at home instantly, because we were men of the same profession needing no introduction.
There was Keller, of an American paper, on his way back to the States from palace executions in Madagascar; there was a burly half-Dutchman, called Zuyland, who owned and edited a paper up country near Johannesburg; and there was myself, who had solemnly put away all journalism, vowing to forget that I had ever known the difference between an imprint and a stereo advertisement.
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