The light brightened. The men ranged themselves at long handles projecting on either side of the mast. They began to move the handles up and down with a kind of bend-and-stretch movement.
“I thought pumps clanked.”
“When they suck dry. These are lifting water.”
“I must thank you gentlemen, for taking me into your confidence. It shall not be abused.”
“With your permission, sir, I will light Mr Talbot as far as the gun-room.”
“You are kind, Mr Benét.”
“Not at all, sir. Anything I can do for you, Mr Talbot—”
“And anything I can do for you, Mr Benét—”
Mr Benét beckoned me to follow him with much politeness.
“Lord, Mr Talbot, she is hogging like a wounded stick.”
“Hogging, Mr Benét?”
“Sagging, too, sir. The one after the other. Bent up amidships, then bent down amidships.”
“Like trying to break a sappy stick.”
“Just so, sir. Hogged on the crest and sagged in the trough.”
“I had not noticed.”
“Well, you would not. You must not expect to detect the movement as excessive unless you have made a study of it. It is like the movement of the moon, sir, which you probably suppose to be a simple curve across the heavens. But it is infinitely complex. I have sometimes had the fancy that the moon is a ship with all her timbers a-creak, hogging, sagging, rolling, pitching—wrung badly and therefore not even moving all of a piece—in fact like our present old load of trouble.”
“So that was why George Gibbs downed about a tumbler of my brandy and topped it off with another of rum! Following the run of the planking indeed! It is my belief he pretended to work where he knew there was drink, having got himself a thorough scare from the feel in his limbs of how the hull was working! Will he report to you?”
“To the first lieutenant, and should have done so already. I am the merest underling.”
“It is not obvious. Would you care to come to my—hutch, I was about to say—and take some of whatever brandy Mr Gibbs has left us?”
“I am on duty, sir, and must return to Mr Summers. But another time avec beaucoup de plaisir!”
He passed a hand through his locks, clapped on his hat, held his hand at the salute as if he were about to remove it—the lanterns of the gun-room as if imbued with the “customs of the sea service” all assumed the same angle as his hand—then turned away to clamber whence we had come. Mr Askew still sat against our wooden wall. He looked at me under his brows.
“I heard you let on to the officer about George Gibbs. George won’t be happy about that.”
I answered him as shortly as I have ever spoken, for the movement seemed to have increased.
“That’s not all he’ll be unhappy about!”
I made my way up the ladders which seemed so imbued with the spirit of the sea rather than the service, they had not so much to be climbed as wrestled with. The movement had indeed increased but I soon grasped the reason. Where we had held our conference in the bowels of the ship, we had sat round the chronometers which would be kept at the point of least movement. Now I was moving away from that point and subject to the wildness of wind, water and wood, being in my proper person by no means as precious an object as these delicately fashioned clocks! By the time I had reached my hutch my calves were aching and were only the most noticeable weakness in a body grown suddenly wearied by the stresses of the motion and of sickness and of a mind belaboured with too much event. As I approached the door I heard a sudden scrambling noise from inside. I flung open the door.
“Wheeler! What the devil? You are haunting me!”
“I was just cleaning, sir—”
“For the third time today? When I want you I’ll call for you!”
“Sir—”
He paused, then spoke in what I can only call his other voice, a voice with a curious trace of some other society in it, other places and customs.
“I’m in hell, sir.”
I sat down in my canvas chair.
“What is all this?”
Wheeler, unlike the other servants in the ship, had commonly a submissive not to say ingratiating attitude. He had never before raised his eyes to stare directly into mine but he did so now.
“Good God, man, have you seen a ghost? No! Don’t answer!”
All at once the pendulum’s movement against which I had been fighting, so far from the still centre by the chronometers, overcame me. I fairly threw myself at the bucket under my canvas bowl and vomited into it. For a time after that, as every sufferer from the condition will know, I was not aware of my surroundings more than that they nauseated me. At last I lay face down in my bunk and wished for death. Wheeler must have taken my bucket away. I know he came back with it and know that he stayed. I think he was urging me to try the effect of the paregoric and I must suppose that at some point I gave way and allowed the dose with its usual magical effect. I believe that Wheeler spent all the time I was unconscious sitting in my chair, for I have a dreamy memory of him there. The first time I swam up from the swathing visions of the opiate I saw him there. He was slumped sideways in the chair, his head resting on the edge of my bunk, in an attitude of complete exhaustion.
(13)
Later still I came to myself with something of a headache and a foul taste in my mouth. Wheeler was still in my cabin but standing up. I muttered at him but he did not go. I sat up and found that I could deal more or less with the movement of the ship.
“I think, Wheeler, you had better explain yourself. But not now. Hot water, if you please. Get me out a clean shirt—what are you waiting for?”
He licked his lips. The ship lurched in a daunting interruption to the relentless movement of the pendulum. Wheeler reeled. He would have fallen had he not grabbed the edge of my bunk.
“What’s the matter with you, man?”
“Sorry, sir. A clean shirt, sir. This drawer—here, sir. But the hot water—”
“Well?”
“The fires is damped down, sir. I doubt that water would come more than warm.”
“Coffee, too. Hot.”
His eyes had focused far away. Whatever it was he imagined, it would seem he did not like it.
“Wheeler!”
“Sir. I might ask Hawkins to put a pot on in the captain’s galley.”
“Very well.”
What a world a ship is! A universe! This was the first time in our whole voyage that I had considered the simple fact that hot water, to say nothing of a hot meal, implies a fire; and a fire implies, oh, firebrick, metal, what have you, some sort of chimney or flue! All these weeks the crew had gone about their business in the knowledge of which I was innocent! Only today, or was it yesterday, parts of the ship had come into my view for the first time—and now and then almost upside down as in a telescope!—the chronometers in their beds, the magazine, pumps aft of the main and forrard of the main—I who had determined once long ago to become master of “the sea affair”! I was irritated with myself for allowing Wheeler to give me the paregoric, as a man might be irritated who has forsworn liquor and now finds himself suffering from the effects of a debauch. I felt that I needed cleaning! There in a ship which might be the death of me, I felt soiled by real dirt, by paregoric, by my inability to shape circumstances—and all because of the distant vision of Marion Chumley! We might sink; but my mind returned upon Marion Chumley!
Wheeler came back but empty-handed.
“What is it now?”
“The captain’s fire is out, sir.”
“What the devil—I mean, why is it out?”
“Seeing we’re likely to be at sea longer than expected, the captain said to put the fire out and save fuel for the ship’s galley, sir.”
“Captain Anderson? Doing without fire for the sake of the passengers?”
“For the crew, Hawkins said, sir.”
“I never would have thought it!”
“Captain Anderson
is a good captain, sir, nobody denies it.”
“You are going to say that his bark is worse than his bite.”
“No, sir. His bite is a deal worse than his bark and that’s bad enough. So no drink, sir. I came to tell you. I’ve asked Bates to get some from the ship’s galley but it won’t be more than lukewarm.”
He withdrew but I am sure went no further off than the lobby. I sat in my chair and waited in a confusion of head and circumstances. There was my dirt, inside and out. There was the movement of the ship, the pendulum which if it did not still nauseate me was a wearisome trial, minute by minute. There was Dashing Jack Deverel now loose where I so desperately longed to be, in that other ship, that beautiful, wild creature—
There was a strange feeling in my naked feet. It was true, good God, the planking was alive! There was a creeping and almost muscular movement! It was a realization even more disconcerting than the brutally uneven movement of the whole ship as the waves passed under her.
Wheeler came in and presented me with a mug of coffee. It was hardly lukewarm but I drank it. He poured a little water into my canvas bowl and I abandoned the coffee in my haste to wash myself. Carried away by a veritable passion for cleanness I scrubbed myself all over in water that soon became at once dirty and stone-cold—as if by so doing I could get rid not merely of my soiling of one sort and another but of the ship’s dirt and of the ship’s confused and daunting circumstances. As I wrapped the clean apron and tail of my shirt between my naked legs I felt more nearly myself than I had done since first a “starter” struck me over the back and head. I dressed, then opened this book and looked briefly through what I had written there. I even took the parcel containing an account of the first part of our voyage from the drawer, and weighed it in my hands, debating whether I should open it and read critically all I had written. But the prospect of repacking it daunted me.
Oh, that self-confident young man who had come aboard, serenely determined to learn everything and control everything! In prospect he had treated this awful expedition, this adventure, as resembling that in a stagecoach, its end as surely to be predicted as that between London and Bath! He was to reach Sydney Cove moving at an even pace over a level sea in some masterpiece of naval construction. But the war had ended, the ship had proved to be rotten as an old apple, Deverel and Willis between them had allowed the apple—the ship—the coach—to lose a wheel, Alcyone had overhauled him and struck him with lightning so that he now knew the pangs of passion, of separation, of jealousy—
“Deverel! Handsome Jack!”
After some time, I do not know how long, I came to myself like a diver returning to the surface. I stared into my small mirror at a too much altered face. I thought to myself then, as I inspected the wan and haggard visage there, that my godfather would be at once amused and condemnatory of me. Edmund in love with the wrong girl—with the impossible girl—why, the old cynic would have preferred me to attempt Lady Somerset! Then, on top of that, Edmund quite likely sinking in the wrong ship—
As if the wrong ship knew that I had insulted her, the planking under my feet fairly bounced.
“Surely—”
I stopped. I said silently to myself that there was something I did not understand behind this half-uttered “surely” which had escaped my lips without my volition. It was not so much a thought as a feeling that “I” ought to be able to do something about “it” and that if “I” could not, then “somebody” ought to be able to! Believe it or not, my thoughts began to centre on our glum captain! And after all, a committee, however ad hoc, had wanted me to interview him! I had obeyed my own instructions and seen Charles Summers, now I would obey theirs! I shouted for Wheeler who opened the door almost before the word was out. He huddled and strapped me into my oilskins. I stepped in my rubber boots through the door, and the whole ship slid away. I stumped, tilted like a seaman towards the waist. I do not know if it was my imagination or not but I thought I heard someone sobbing in the last of the hutches on my side of the lobby. I stood in the waist, holding on to the break of the poop. Our ship was indeed quicker in her roll. Her movement was a constant fret, with now and then a jerk in it which seemed like impatience or furious anger rather. Rain and spray flying horizontally over the windward rail stung my face like birdshot. The ship heaved at each wave as if she might get forward but then came upright in much the same place as before. The sails, rain and spray streaming from the clew, spread as they were on the mainmast alone and huge, now seemed a pitiful response to the wind’s impulsion. Yet despite all this wild weather there was much activity with ropes of various sizes on the fo’castle. They were trying, it seemed, to perform some operation with cables, though I was quite unable to understand what it was. They seemed to spend quite a deal of their time under water and I was glad to be a passenger and not an officer, let alone a seaman. I turned and began to climb towards the poop. Above and aft of the wheel with its two glistening quartermasters, partly visible over the forrard rail of his deck, stood Captain Anderson. He wore a shabby oilskin and sou’wester and as one indifferent to a capful of water was staring moodily into the eye of the wind. I was working my careful way round the men at the wheel when the captain noticed me. He smiled! It was a dreadful sight, a momentary glimpse of a few teeth, as if someone had thrown a yellow pebble into his glumness. I opened my mouth but he was already turning away. I followed, riskily running up the ladder to detain him, but by the time I had reached the deck he had nipped down his private companionway and disappeared. The message was plain. Keep off! Yet he had smiled at me, however briefly and artificially, a thing not known before.
As in a dream, I imagined yellow hair, a fresh complexion, and heard the voice of Mr Benét say: I submit, sir, in this difficulty you should habitually greet the passengers with cheerfulness. Once they feel the captain himself has cause for concern they will be no end of trouble!
Would he dare? Oh yes, I believe a young officer who would “attempt” handsome Lady Somerset while her husband was no more than walking his rounds must be bold to the point of foolhardiness!
Our little sailing master, Mr Smiles, had the watch. Now that the captain had gone below he moved over from the starboard side and stood facing the wind.
“Well, Mr Smiles, I am recovered as you see and would not be anywhere else for one thousand pounds!”
Mr Smiles examined my face in a distant way as if it had been at the horizon. His eyes were red-rimmed from the spray. He lifted one finger to his lips as if to command silence.
“What do you mean, Mr Smiles? A thousand pounds, I said. I tell you what, sir. After I had suffered a few bangs on the head I thought I must be out of my wits; but down below there is a real madman who thinks in all this salt turmoil that he can buy safety!”
Mr Smiles took his finger from his lips.
“There are ships, Mr Talbot, in which every man Jack is mad save one.”
“To tell you the truth I am coming to believe that all men who choose this awful waste as an habitation and profession must be mad so you may well be right! How she rolls—devil take it, I spend my time clambering like an ape from one handhold to another. I marvel you can so keep your feet and treat the movement with such indifference.”
The sailing master did not reply. He returned to watch the sea. He seemed to be inspecting what could be seen of that vastly furrowed prospect as if he were choosing a path over it. It came to me that my conversation with the man was not just a casual infringement of the captain’s Standing Orders but a positive shattering of them. Perhaps that was why the man had laid his finger to his lips! Times and the weather had changed! But I did not wish to make our position any more complicated than it was. I nodded to Mr Smiles and made my way down to the lobby again, having had enough of the freshness of the open air.
I saw Wheeler slide into my hutch. I could not bear more to do with the man and used the rails on the walls of the hutches to get myself to the saloon. But the committee was not there, only little Mr Pike. I am sorry
to say that I collapsed on the bench below the stern window and stayed so with my head on the table.
“You are sick as the rest of them, Mr Talbot.”
I grunted in reply. The man went on.
“I should not have thought it of you, Mr Talbot. But then you have been injured. I trust your head is better. I struck my own on the lintel when the ship rolled but it is better now. Have you seen Mr Summers?”
“Where is the committee?”
“The movement is too much for them. Mr Prettiman has had a heavy fall. But I will go and call them if you wish.” I shook my head.
“I will wait till they are recovered enough to appear. I believe Bowles to be a superior man. He has what the Romans would call ‘gravitas’. I am surprised.”
“You need not be, sir. He has studied law.”
It was quite extraordinary how quickly little Pike was able to bore one.
“You should be resting like the others, Mr Pike.”
“Oh no. I do not get flung about much, you see. As I am small and light, if I lose my footing I generally manage to scramble up. Not like poor Mr Brocklebank who dare not leave his bunk in this weather except to—You know, sir, I prefer sitting here, talking to you, rather than being with my family? That is dreadful, quite dreadful I know but after a while I simply cannot stand it no matter how anxious I am and no matter how much I love them.”
“Anxious? What on earth for?”
“They do not really rest, Mr Talbot. Every now and then they play in the bed—the bunk, the upper bunk, Mr Talbot, one at each end. They play like I said but then it is tears and seems to get worse. They don’t play for more than a moment but lie there—well, whining, I suppose, I had better say it though Mrs Pike does not like the word. She is not well herself, sir. What are we to do? Mrs Pike seems to believe I can do something which to tell the truth is why I am out here but I cannot. That hurts more than anything.”
I recalled Charles’s instructions to me.
“You should find her faith in you flattering, Mr Pike.”
To the Ends of the Earth Page 37