by Paul Binding
Well, if ever there was a man to talk to about a beautiful girl spied in a park, it was Will Postgate, though he would be contemptuous in the extreme of anybody who had simply walked away from her. Will would have been up that path, past those horse-chestnuts and accosting the girl as she addressed her admiring band of guttersnipes, before you could say knife. But I was no Will Postgate.
Not that I wanted him to give me any more instruction in what he sometimes called Ars amatoria (in fact he didn’t know any more Latin than I did!). Being taken by him to Limehouse had been a nasty mistake whose poison I could sometimes still feel the effects of—when I was tired, or when I’d just seen a pretty female of the pure breed to which She of the Royal Gardens so evidently belonged.
And no, Will, I was not drunk that farewell dinner in Soho. Others of the company might have been, but not myself. Also the day on which he proposed to come was none other than that on which Hans and I had been invited to luncheon with Edmund and his family. The letter bore no address, having been obviously written out on the Open Road, so I had no means of informing him that I might well not be in when he turned up at Castelaniene in Dengate . . . Anyhow I should be able to find him a room somewhere easily enough. “The Wheatsheaf” would probably be the most acceptable nearest “hostelry” for him. If I had a best friend it was surely Will, and I should endeavor to make his brief stay in Dengate a rewarding one.
When I’d reached the attic landing, Hans called out: “Hullo Martin?”
“Hullo to you, Hans!”
“I suppose you have no news of him?”
“None, I’m afraid.”
“If you can spare the time, I’d like a talk.”
So I entered the Mercy Room, to which I was no longer a stranger even though strange was what the place still seemed. Hans was out of bed, fully dressed, seated at the table on which perched the stuffed Golden Eagle. He’d been making sketches of this on sheets of artist’s paper. “Is your article finished now?”
“It is, yes!”
“You’ve handed it into your editor?”
“Yes, and it’ll appear on Wednesday.”
“So you won’t be able to add anything to it?”
“Afraid not!” What if he suddenly had some amazing memory which would change the complexion of what was already written? But—
“Don’t be afraid. I’m glad. You see, I’ve been keeping back part of what I experienced on Dronning Margrete. I didn’t want you to be tempted to put any of it in your paper.”
I felt my professional honor had been at least a tad impugned. “About . . . Johnston?” I hazarded.
“How did you know?” Because, I could have added, your bo’sun—whom I see as a blonde giant with a bull-like head and massive shoulders—has, thanks to you, taken residence in my own imagination. But instead I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Well, I’m a newspaper-man, aren’t I? But tell me, please! I’m all ears.”
“I didn’t say much about how Johnston was after he’d joined our ship, did I?”
“You said he had a more remarkable store of knowledge than your usual bo’sun.”
“Yes, far more! While we were still keeping close to the Canadian coast, we could hear him talking to himself about tidal streams and contours and the slope of the sea-bottom, in a way nobody below the rank of Second Mate ever can. And when we’d got further out into the Atlantic, he turned his attention to the stars and the ‘fix’ they provided for the ship’s course. He knew exactly what star would be where in the night-sky, and he had an old sextant which you could tell had been much used. You know what a sextant is,” he added, seeing my blank look. “The instrument with an eye-piece and an angular scale that you hold in the hand to work out latitude and longitude. Johnston would look through its eye-piece every evening to determine the angle of a star to the horizon. And that’s Captain and Chief Mate’s work, Martin. Not the business of the Lower Deck’s. Not what a normal bo’sun troubles himself with. And I’ve no doubt his estimations were accurate every time, come calm come storm.
“But the general information in his head was just as astonishing, and sometimes he unloaded it, and we’d reel back in wonder. He told us, for instance, that whales spend three times as much of their lives playing as they do searching for food, and that dolphins are so fond of their offspring they follow them affectionately long after they’ve grown up.”
“Hans,” I interrupted him, “I want to take all this down. Have no fear, nobody at The Advertiser or any other newspaper will ever see a sentence of it. But let me get my reporter’s pad from my bedroom. Please!”
Hans, if a trifle reluctantly, consented.
So now follows Hans Lyngstrand’s story, the secret part, again minus my exclamations for never had I heard a narrative that held me so strongly, and I couldn’t prevent myself from commenting or occasionally asking for repetitions. I feel now able to say, from this distance in time, that my life, my development, would have gone entirely differently had I never heard it.
“To give you an example of the astounding knowledge at Johnston’s disposal, one afternoon we heard thunder rolling in the distance, and he said, ‘Do you know the origin of that sound?’ None of us did. ‘It began with the mating of Ukko with Akka,’ he said. None of us understood him. Then, another time, we were all looking up at the North Star—the Pole Star—and he asked, ‘Does the dome of the sky look like anything to you fellows?’ We dared not answer for fear of saying something wrong. ‘It’s like the top half of a great broken egg, isn’t it?’ We quickly agreed. Then he explained that this was how the ancients in his country saw it; they believed that before our universe came into being, a gigantic water-bird laid an egg which then exploded; this was the origin of everything we know. And half of that egg still revolves around the North Star, but from time to time gets so close to it that it causes a huge whirling in space, and that in turn churns up the sea below. All the time he spoke, he was smiling, though he wasn’t a man who smiled much. Then he said: ‘Don’t worry, boys. If any of you fall overboard, all the white spray on the waves will carry you safely and speedily enough to the Great Quiet Land of the Dead. That’s what the spray is for!’
“Soon after he’d taken up his appointment, First Mate Andersen decided I should act as bo’sun’s messenger, and also help him with accounts, duty-rosters, etcetera. I had increasingly been doing these things for poor old Karlsson. Johnston was even more efficient than the Swede had been but not so good a task-master, too hard to please, too hard to talk to. But every so often he’d relax and when we heard him on the subject of seals, whales, dolphins, or porpoises, it felt as good as hearing an actual sea-creature speak.
“The third day out of Halifax we ran into shocking bad weather, a low depression bearing down on the sea and whipping it up. Mile-long wave trains collided and clashed, and we’d regularly find ourselves in water troughs four to six meters deep. Hard to believe at times that any ship could climb her way out, but ours did, time and time again—up-up very gingerly, then CRASH! down-down on the other side of the water-wall. But hour after hour, day after day of all that was hell. We used to tell ourselves, well, things can never be as bad again. But two weeks later they were, not just as bad but worse—in your Dover Straits.
“To spare the two of us difficulties in getting ’round the ship when she was pitching and tossing so much, Third Mate Wilhelm suggested I move into Johnston’s cabin. This had two berths in it at opposite ends, one biggish one, his; one very narrow one, mine. That was a sound enough plan bearing in mind what occurred next.
“Suddenly our ship made a shuddering lurch forward that took every one completely by surprise, even old Johnston who tripped down the stairs into the Lower Deck and wrenched his foot. Tough as old boots though he was, he cried out in pain if only for a moment. Third Mate then decided he must be spared any further unnecessary movement for a while, but should lie on his bunk with his injured foot raised. So there the two of us were together, Martin, him and me, and then to make th
ings worse—I feel ashamed even now—I became seasick. Me who’d been a sailor the best part of five years! Johnston didn’t even try to disguise his contempt. And I went on throwing up until I thought there’d soon be little—or nothing—left of me.
“Johnston was himself a reluctant, foul-tempered patient. He had to be told many times, ‘The more you rest the foot, the sooner you will get better enough to resume your duties. The ship needs you to improve.’
“‘Ach, I’m bored as hell with lying down!’ he’d grumble back. ‘What do you think I am? I’m a man of action, not some silly girl with the vapors. Or’—looking at me—‘a fledgling knocked sideways by a touch of seasickness.’ Then he had an inspiration. ‘Tell you what, though! I could just about bear passing the time if you gave me that stash of old newspapers from the Captain’s room. Good for my Norwegian.’
“Good for his Norwegian, eh? He always used English to me, which you might think odd for someone who knew enough of my native language to be able to read papers published in it. In fact I’d already caught him a few times talking Norwegian both to Anders Andersen and to the Captain himself, though his accent was odd—like somebody, I thought, from the very far north, from Finnmark, beyond the Arctic Circle. I suppose he must have worked on some ship that called at Hammerfest and Kirkenes and picked up hands from there. Whatever, he plainly encountered no difficulties reading his way through this pile of damp-smelling, yellowing old newspapers, and I could see that they actually were taking his mind off the pain in his foot, and therefore off all those tasks he was temporarily unable to carry out.
“The two of us must have made a funny picture, Martin, our cabin floor tilting first upwards, then downwards, then upwards again, our porthole showing one moment nothing but sky, the next nothing but sea, then nothing but sky again, and him with his swollen foot screwing up his eyes over newspaper stories about communities several thousand miles away, and me spewing my guts out into a bucket and trying to divert myself by making pictures in my head. For some reason I’d found myself all trip long remembering my grandfather—my mother’s father, that is. He’d been a very accomplished wood-carver up in the mountains to the back of Åndalsnes on Romsdalsfjord, and I recollected Herr Strømme telling me that Bertel Thorvaldsen’s father, an Icelander, had also been a wood-carver. If you have sculpture in your blood, perhaps sooner or later, it has to come out—and I relieved those tedious hours of the storm by imagining carvings I myself might make, mostly of friends of mine among the crew.
“And then all of a sudden, my daydreaming was broken into by a quite terrifying sound, less like a human being than an enraged animal at bay, boar or elk or wolf.
“I hadn’t vomited for about a quarter of an hour so felt stable enough to risk turning my head to look at him. My first thought was that my cabinmate must have made an awkward ill-judged movement and started up the pain in his foot afresh. But no; there he was in precisely the same physical position as when I’d last glanced at him, with the same newspaper in his hands—the Romsdals Budsticke, the local paper of the very part of the fjordland my grandfather came from. Johnston’s hands were trembling to such a degree that the sheets of newsprint rattled in them, and his face had turned white as chalk. And then—not caring that I was in the room, or perhaps not even remembering that I was there—he crumpled the whole paper up and hurled it on the floor, like some wild ill-behaved boy in a rage. But that wasn’t the end; having done this crumpling, he leaned over, picked up the sheets, and began in a kind of slow motion to tear them into small strips. I watched him, horrified, mesmerized; I’d never seen anybody behave like that ever, even though I’d seen hands getting roaring tight in port and picking fights.
“When he’d finished ripping up the entire Budsticke, he bent down and pushed all the strips away from him so they formed an untidy heap on the floor, and then said in a low throaty growl—to himself, mind, not me: ‘Married. To another man. While I was away.’
“No, I haven’t told you that right, Martin. That isn’t what Johnston said. He said: ‘Giftet sig. Med en anden mand. Mens jeg var borte.’ I could not believe my ears, in spite of those brief conversations of his I’d overheard with the Captain and First Mate Andersen. I thought, well, either he’s a genius at languages or his friends have taught him exceptionally well, because he said those words exactly as a real Norwegian would.
“Should I now say something, I wondered. If only to remind him he was not alone, that Hans Lyngstrand was right there, close by. But he hadn’t finished yet. In that same voice, choking and cracking with passion (that is the only word for it, Martin, I promise you—I’ve searched for others when telling the story to myself), Johnston went on to say: ‘But mine she is, and mine she shall become. And she shall follow me, if I have to come back home and carry her off as a drowned man from the dark sea.’ No, what he actually said was—sounds even more alarming, I think, in Norwegian: ‘Men min er hun og min skal hun bli’. Og mig skal hun følge, om jeg så skal komme hjem og hente hende som en druknet mand fra svarte sjøen.’ I felt he was making some solemn sacred vow to the old Gods of the North. It was a threat and a promise at one and the same time. What would you think, Martin, if you overheard a man saying something of that sort in that manner? It wouldn’t be something you’d forget lightly, would it? Well, I haven’t either, even though so much else has happened to me since—and to others, so many dreadful, tragic things. You see, I knew he meant what he was saying. Knew from his eyes, his voice, his clenched fists.
“Of course working out what I’d just witnessed wasn’t too hard: Johnston had come across an announcement in Romsdals Budsticke of the marriage of a woman he believed to be his—by love or betrothal, or possibly both. But what was his state of mind when he made that oath? I couldn’t decide even as I witnessed it, let alone later. Was it grief? Was it fury? Was it disappointment so overwhelming that he felt he couldn’t get his own life back until he’d avenged himself? Or else had taken the woman herself back into his possession. The force with which he spoke—I felt I would never be able to rid my mind of his words. And I haven’t done so. I am as superstitious, I guess, as any other seaman.
“As I’ve just said, Johnston appeared unaware of my very presence. Now he reached across his bunk for the heap of torn newspaper-strips and chucked the whole lot into the wastepaper tin in the corner. After that he shuffled all the other old Norwegian newspapers together, saying—in English this time—but still more to himself than to me: ‘And to think I was on my way back to her. To think that was why I chose to work on this damned ship!’ I don’t know why he switched languages. Though he’d never once addressed me in my native tongue, he knew I was Norwegian and so must have understood exactly what he’d said in his frenzy. Perhaps he spoke in English because it was the language he’d been using during his absence from this woman he loved so much—who presumably was herself Norwegian.
“I didn’t know how I ought to respond to him when eventually our eyes met. Whatever could I say that would be of the least use to him? I almost hoped I’d retch again; that horrible business would at least stop me having to make any comment. But, as it happened, the sea these last minutes had been noticeably calming down, and the ship was steadying. Thank the Lord! Normality had returned. All at once I found myself dozy, because in all the adverse circumstances it hadn’t been possible to get any proper sleep. But now we all could. When I woke up, wonderfully free of seasickness, Johnston said in a voice that didn’t brook disagreement: ‘If you feel up to going about your errands again, I’ve got one or two things for you to do. Chief of ’em is taking this heap of shitty old Norwegian newspapers back to our Captain’s office. They have no interest for me. But if he has some American or English ones, then I might take a peek at them. And don’t go forgetting that accounts sheet that you said you’d check. You’ve wasted too much damned time as it is honking like a baby . . .’ Not long after this, Johan, one of the crew most skilled at that sort of business, came in and applied a fresh poultice to Jo
hnston’s sprain, so by the next morning he too had improved, and was able to hobble about the decks with a stick. And then the two of us went back, to my enormous relief, to separate quarters.
“But that wasn’t quite the end of the matter, Martin. Two evenings later, Johnston and I were once more together in his cabin with nobody in earshot, going over a newly drawn-up job roster. So he caught me offguard when he said, in the same growl in which he’d spoken of his faithless fiancée: ‘Hans Lyngstrand, I don’t know if you were too busy spewing to hear what I said when I read that filthy rag, the Romsdals Budsticke.’ I tried my hardest to look as if I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘But if I find you’ve told others on this ship about it . . .’—I tried not to let my apprehension show—‘well, I wouldn’t like to be you, that’s all.’
“I said, quite truthfully: ‘Nobody on this ship has heard a thing about the matter, and nobody on this ship ever will!’ Of course, with these words I was really admitting that I had heard something. I expressed myself in the way I did because I thought—well, if, if I ever do go to Romsdalsfjord, my own grandfather’s country, might it not be my duty to tell someone—particularly this woman and her husband, whoever they might be—about Johnston’s strange vow? Because he had made it in complete seriousness. And when I looked at him after he’d said he wouldn’t like to be me, it came to me in a flash that he was capable of killing somebody—and not only that: ten chances to one, he actually had killed somebody already.