The World of Alphonse Allais by Alphonse Allais

Author:Alphonse Allais [Miles Kington]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571306091
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2015-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

IT’S LOVE THAT MAKES YOU GO ROUND THE WORLD

He was an officer in the Scottish Navy. His name was Captain MacNee but to his fellow officers he was always Captain Steelcock. He was, in fact, what you might call a man’s man. A lady’s man, rather. Either way, he was all man. He stood fully six foot two in his stockinged feet, which is the nearest the English can get to saying that he was almost two metres tall. Quite a man.

He was also an immaculate dresser and without doubt the coolest thing in naval uniform since Nelson’s Column. (Except when pursuing women, which was his main purpose in life.) To top it all, he was one of the very few officers in the Scottish Navy who insisted on wearing a monocle at all times – the crew of the Topsy Turvy, the three-masted frigate over which he assumed total command next to God, swore that he went to bed with his monocle still firmly screwed in, though none of them had ever actually seen him do so.

Nor, come to that, had any of them ever seen him become in the slightest way involved in the running of the ship. He always kept implacably aloof from naval matters, whatever the weather, staying well apart on the bridge. There he strolled up and down by himself, impeccably dressed, hands behind his back, for all the world like a gentleman of Edinburgh taking the air in Princes Street. The running and steering of the ship was left to the first officer, an old sea-dog from Dundee who knew the sea better than the back of his hand. Occasionally he came to tell the captain what course they were on and Steelcock would try to look tremendously interested, but you could see that his mind was far away and that he really couldn’t care less what longitude or latitude they were in.

His mind was far away, did I say? It was in another world. Because what Steelcock was doing was thinking about women. Thinking about the women he had just left. The women he had still not met. The women he had known and the women he wanted to know. Just thinking about women, in fact.

Sometimes he would lean on the taffrail for hours, staring out to sea. Was it because the ocean seemed to him the perfect symbol of the fickleness of woman? Or was he hoping against hope that a lovely mermaid would emerge before his eyes? (Personally, I tend to the first theory. I agree wholeheartedly with the poet when he says that waves are a symbol of the treachery and duplicity of women. Be damned to women, say I!)*

But whenever the next port of call came in sight, Steelcock changed utterly. From being an ordinary man he turned into a whirlpool of passion, an internal hurricane of longing and lust that made the worst storm at sea seem mild by comparison. And no sooner had the ship come alongside

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