Gay Phoenix Read Online Free

criminal experience. I’d be a sad amateur at that, I need hardly say. South Australia does, of course, turn up some bizarre mysteries and even atrocities from time to time. But I hear of anything of the sort very much at second-hand – forensic medicine being no line of mine. It’s true, indeed, that what I want briefly to recall falls within a discipline almost equally peripheral, so far as I’m concerned. The story is one upon which the voice of psychiatry could well make itself heard. So it’s a pity that no psychiatrist is among our number.’
    Perhaps a somewhat self-conscious proem, Appleby told himself. And one faintly gathered that, in these Antipodean regions, any mad addiction to the speculations of Sigmund Freud and his successors would be regarded as an indecorously new-fangled thing. But at least it was somehow possible to guess that Professor Budgery wasn’t going to be entirely a bore. He possessed the art of the build-up. It was quite probable that he possessed the art of the story-teller as well. Mr Justice Somebody, an elderly and heavily-built man with habits which might conduce to drowsiness at an hour like this, was plainly going to pay attention to his host. Appleby himself could certainly do nothing less. He suspected that comment might subsequently be required of him.
    ‘The episode I shall tell you about,’ Budgery continued, ‘took place several years ago. It concerns a yacht I shall call the Jabberwock , and a yachtsman I shall call Buzfuz.’
    ‘A lawyer?’ Mr Justice Somebody asked sharply.
    ‘Ah, there you have me.’ Budgery was delighted. ‘I have chosen the sobriquet badly, my dear George. Dickens’ Serjeant Buzfuz is a false association. My man was almost certainly not a barrister – and if he had embraced any other regular profession, I never heard of it. He was a man of means – almost assuredly of substantial means – but more than that never came to me. Unless one is engaged in some advertising venture, one can’t in these days, I imagine, scour the oceans in a costly one-man contraption without being, as the young people say, in the lolly.’ Budgery paused on this, perhaps to mark his command of an up-to-the-moment demotic vocabulary. ‘But you must allow me to continue calling him Buzfuz. I have so denominated him to pupils from time to time. No names – no real names – no pack drill, eh? One rather clings to those tricks of professional reticence.’
    ‘Then Buzfuz let him be,’ Mr Justice George Somebody said judicially. ‘And now, Tim, go ahead.’
    So Professor Timothy Budgery went ahead.
    ‘I’ve spoken of one-man contraptions. The Jabberwock was that in the sense that it could perfectly well be sailed single-handed. But Colin Buzfuz – I must give him a Christian name, for a reason you will presently appreciate – commonly pottered about the globe with a companion. And that’s important. There are men, you know, who crave for absolute solitude as desperately as others may crave for a woman, or an addictive drug, or just for the bottle. The early history of this continent is full of what we call loners. And our tramps – Swagmen is our word, Appleby – often qualify as being just that. However, that’s by the way – and irrelevant, since the Buzfuzes were not Australian.’
    ‘The Buzfuzes?’ Appleby said.
    ‘There were two of them, as you must presently hear. But the immediate point is Colin, who could take fair doses of solitude, but was not temperamentally one of those fanatics for it. And he had the bad luck to have rather too much of it thrust on him in the end. Not that it wasn’t – or that much of it wasn’t – his own fault. One has to admire him, in a way. I’m bound to admit I admired him myself, even although his foolhardiness resulted in his becoming a considerable nuisance to myself and other people. He had felt a challenge, I think one may say, and been not quite certain that he had adequately faced up to it. So he tried