Cumbershum was buttonholed in his descent by Mr Jones, the purser. Mr Jones, increasingly concerned for his property in the ship, begged for a few moments of Mr Cumbershum’s time. Later Mr Cumbershum related the interview to Charles Summers and the other officers with every evidence of enjoyment.
“Mr Cumbershum, I beg of you. Will the ship sink?”
As luck would have it, Cumbershum was one of the most heavily endebted officers. He shouted with laughter.
“Yes, the bloody ship will sink, you yellow-bellied bastard, and death pays all debts!”
The result was not what Cumbershum expected. Mr Jones, in the grip of his ruling passion, hurried away, then returned with a handful of IOUs for which he demanded payment on the spot. Cumbershum refused, suggesting a use for the papers which I do not feel called on to particularize. The effect of this refusal was to throw the man into a kind of subdued panic. He hurried about the ship, heedless of her movement which sometimes put him in peril of drowning as if his own safety were the last thing in the world he was considering. In another man it would have been folly or heroism or both. He tried to call in his IOUs throughout the whole ship and met everywhere with a refusal sometimes even blunter than Cumbershum’s. I believe nothing, neither the arrival of King Neptune when we crossed the line, nor the entertainment given when we and Alcyone lay side by side, caused such general and on the whole beneficial amusement. For a while we were indeed a “happy ship”!
By the time I had recovered from my strange disability or sickness, whatever it was, it was my turn to be approached. Mr Jones presented me with an inflated account for candles and paregoric. I was inspired! I reduced the man to stillness and silence when I replied that I did not owe him anything. I owed money to Wheeler who was dead. I was prepared to pay Wheeler’s heirs and assigns in due course.
After much anxious expostulation on his part Mr Jones recalled our previous conversation.
“At least, Mr Talbot, you will pay me for the container you spoke of!”
“Container?”
“For your journal—to float it off!”
“Ah, I remember. But why should I pay you? Is not an IOU sufficient?”
The man gave a kind of whinny.
“No cash, Mr Talbot, no container!”
I thought for a moment. As the reader may recollect, it was true I had asked for something in which to put my writings and commit them to the waves but the suggestion had been made more than half in jest. It was typical of Mr Jones to remember the remark, take it seriously and determine to profit therefrom. A way opened before me of revenging Humanity on Inhumanity!
“Very well, Mr Jones. I will buy a container from you—on one condition. That you find room for it in your boat!”
There now ensued a passionate argument. At last Mr Jones agreed to carry the thing ashore and see it forwarded to the appropriate address. The first container he produced he called a pipkin. When I saw how small it was and that it was made of pottery I would have none of it.
“Suppose you and your boat are dashed on the rocks, sir. Why you might burst like a dead sheep in the sun and the pipkin with you!”
Mr Jones’s complexion took on a greenish hue. He would sell me a firkin.
“And what is a firkin?”
“A small wooden cask, sir.”
“Very well.”
The firkin when it came proved to be a barrel that had held eight gallons of some liquid or other.
“What the devil, man! This would go near to holding me myself!”
The price was exorbitant. I reduced it by more than half, using, I am compelled to say, some of that “hoity-toity” which had so displeased Mr Askew.
“And now, Mr Jones, you will swear to take this firkin ashore with you and forward it to the right address, remembering that at this solemn moment we are both near that eternal judgement which awaits all men—Good God!”
I must own that this last ejaculation was out of my part however much it was in character. The fact is, years of religious lessons, thousands of church services and the whole mighty engine of the Church rose up behind me and I found it come near to clouting me over the head like a flailing sheet. I did indeed experience a touch of that judgement I had mentioned so frivolously and I did not like it.
“Swear.”
Mr Jones, touched possibly by the same feelings, answered tremulously,
“I swear.”
Devil take it, this was Hamlet and I felt downright uneasy! I could not but feel that the ghost of Colley was roaming the ship. Well—we were in mortal danger, and the mind plays tricks.
“And Mr Jones, if we should survive you will buy the cask back for what I gave for it—I’m odd like that, you know!”
Now it has to be added that if the ship was in a perilous state and I in a strange one, her company were in even stranger case. As if Mr Jones and Cumbershum between them had released among us something until then bound in and confined, the happiness of our “happy ship” changed in quality and became what I can only call a communal hysteria. Nor was it womanish as the word suggests. At its worst and most severe it could be typified as a kind of uncontrollable laughter at the most trivial of causes. At its best it was a peculiarly British sense of fun, of play. There was a little coldness in it, a contempt for life, even a touch of savagery. It came to me that at its best it might be something like that humour said to prevail among the victims of the French Terror before their martyrdom. At its worst it had something of the blasphemy, wild humour, debauchery and fury which sometimes erupts in Newgate Gaol when the wretches confined there hear the last confirmation of their fate. I suppose, too, there were men and women who prayed. For by now there was not a man, woman or child who did not know in what a sad case we stood. The dragrope took off more weed and the business was finished but I do not believe many of the passengers or emigrants took much notice. By now we all saw too clearly.
So much, then, for the efforts at concealing the state of the ship from all but the naval officers! I thought my own joke was now over, but the truth is it got out of hand. Mr Gilland, the cooper, asking nothing for the service, loosened the bands of the firkin and knocked out the head. I placed the journal intended for my godfather inside and this same folio with it. But I had not realized how widely all was known. Good God, hardly a passenger or an emigrant but wished to have some message included, some small package, some object, a ring, a bauble, a book—a journal!—something, anything which whatever it was would seem by its survival to prolong a vestige of life. This is how people are, but if I had not had the experience I would never have believed it. Indeed so general was the demand for space in my firkin that Charles Summers was driven to protest, though amiably enough.
“My dear Edmund! You have so many clients that Webber who ought to be looking after the rest of the wardroom has become little more than your doorman!”
“What am I to do? The thing has become a bore and thoroughly out of hand.”
“You are now the most popular man in the ship.”
“If anything were needed to convince me of the volatility of the common people—”
“Speaking for us common people—”
“Charles, I will have no more of this modesty! I shall live to see you an admiral yet!”
“I will have it piped through the ship that papers may be brought to Mr Talbot but only during the first dog. The thing will die off in a day or two.”
He went off to continue his preparations for the “frapping”.
There was I, then, sitting like Matthew at the seat of custom for two hours a day. I do seriously believe that during one short period and before I had dressed him down, Webber was actually charging admission! Like the ghost of Colley, the spirit of Mr Jones was abroad. Nevertheless the great majority of those who came were simple souls. They divided sharply into two groups. There were those who giggled and hoped to share the jest against Mr Jones. There were those who were only too sadly in earnest. The white line which had been drawn across the deck
at the mainmast was now, it seemed, washed clean away. I was to find this more than a simple fact—it was indeed a metaphor of our condition! But more of that at a later date. Suffice it to say my visitors were many and various. It might be a poor emigrant, his hat in one hand, his paper in the other, or a sniggering tar holding out an inch of his own queue or pigtail with the hope that I was “making the bugger sweat, sir”. Indeed my cask soon began to resemble the “bran tub” which we children used to enjoy at Christmas. God knows, in that ship we could have done with any enjoyment we could get!
I must say also that among the other frivolities which rose so preposterously from our danger was a series of catch phrases. A part of watch ordered by a petty officer to pick up a rope or the like would reply as one man—“Aye aye. We’re odd like that, you know!” There was even one occasion—and here I must implore the ladies, for after all poetry is their proper speech and prose means nothing to them—I must ask them to avert their eyes from the following paragraphs.
Mr Taylor appeared noisily with even more than his usual high spirits. He could not stop laughing until I shook him. Knowing Mr Taylor I was prepared to hear of some monstrous piece of misfortune which had befallen someone and which seemed to him the height of comedy—but no. When at last I got him quiet and he had recovered from my shaking I demanded to know the worst.
“It’s a riddle, you see, sir!”
“A riddle?”
“Yes, sir! What—” but having got that far humour was too much for him and he had to be shaken again.
“Now then, my lad, finish what you have to say before I throw you overboard.”
“Sir. The riddle is: ‘What makes the ship roll so?’”
“Well, what makes the ship roll so?”
We had another convulsion before he got out the answer.
“Lord Talbot’s firkin!”
I dropped the boy and returned to my hutch. If the result of peril was to lower the ship to that level, I thought, she has no need to sink but has done so already.
After I had sat for a dog watch without a “client” I asked for Mr Gilland, the cooper, and summoned Mr Jones. When they were together before me I had Mr Gilland replace the lid and put back the bands. They were, I said, witness to the security of the container. I had the bung left open though the rest of the cask was sealed. I explained to Mr Jones that I might want to insert some dying wish or prayer when we were foundering and before he himself left the vessel. I must confess the joke had become tedious. It even turned sour when I contemplated all that remained of Edmund Talbot bouncing round the Southern Ocean in circumstances where its chances of reaching the desired destination would be small beyond computation! More than that, I found myself suddenly deprived of my journals and with nothing to write or do except endure the antics and threat of our increasingly unseaworthy vessel.
The reader will have grasped that I, at least, survived the voyage. But like any possible reader, when I reread what I had written, the abrupt end of my journal—call it “book two”—troubled me and does so now. Indeed, to call it a journal is to stretch the term unduly. An attentive reader may well be able to identify the widely separated occasions on which I tried to describe what had happened during a period of days and so bring the thing up to date. I was often writing of the past when much was happening at the moment. A considerable length of time separates the ending of my journal proper and this postscriptum. I have been tempted to avoid the problem of the too abrupt ending by continuing the journal retrospectively so to speak, pretending to have written it in the ship. But the distance in time is too great. The attempt would be disingenuous. More—it would be plain dishonest. Worse than that if it were possible the attempt would be detected, for the style—I flatter myself I have a style, however threadbare—would change. Immediacy would be lost. When I reread “book one”—in the next volume you will find out when and why that was!—I found it had gained a great deal by the inclusion of Colley’s affecting if unfinished letter. For though the poor fellow may not have been much of a priest there was a touch of genius in his vivid and fluent use of his native tongue: whereas “book two” must rely on my own unaided efforts except where I report the actual words of other people. It is true, however, that what I now think to have been an ingenuous opening of my heart to the page is not without a force which I did not suspect until I came to read it much later. But to return to the head of this paragraph. To add this postscriptum seemed the most reasonable solution to my difficulty.
Yet a properer and lengthier description of the remainder of our voyage still remains desirable. In my memory the voyage is a single thing, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Our further adventures were no less and perhaps more arduous than the preceding ones. Honesty compels me to promise a plain narrative at some later date which will see the voyage ended and which narrative shall be my “book three”. I cannot pretend to Colley’s talent and hope that the strangeness and hazard of the events will compensate for the plainness of the writing.
There is another consideration. I am in half a mind to publish! Perhaps then these words may be read not just by those dear to me but by a far wider audience. The desire of print has grown on me. What began at my godfather’s behest proceeded by my own growing inclination and I now find myself no more or less than a common writer with all the ambitions if not all the failings of that breed. I put this very point to Mr Brocklebank during the highest days of our hilarity, confessing that I felt myself insufficiently dissolute for the profession, to which he replied in his voice rotten as a medlar—“My dear sir! Continue to drink as you do and you will carry all before you!” I need hardly say he was deeply in his cups on that occasion as on so many others. But may it not be that a man of breeding, education and intelligence will lend the profession a little of the dignity our hack-writers have taken from it?
Failings? I admit to ambitions. To be printed is the smallest of them! Come, my dear reader, who has ever written without the desire to communicate? We assume a reader of our words even when we use them to deny his existence. I will go further. Who has ever written extensively without finding himself lured little by little into the desire to captivate an audience? There is in me, as in all writers, what Milton called “that last infirmity of noble mind”, the desire for a name more widely known, admiration more generously given, for a greater measure of interest in the author’s character and person on the part of the Sex. So though I have sometimes said and often thought that I wrote only for myself I have more often wondered to whom I was writing—my Lady Mother, or Another, or an old school friend, his face remembered, his name forgotten. I have also found myself envisaging with gusto the three splendid volumes of Talbot’s Voyage or The Ends of the Earth! All this then to apologize to a conjectural audience which may have been startled by the abruptly ended journal of “book two” but may be mollified and excited as much as I can contrive by this “puff” for a third volume!
Fire Down Below
(1)
Captain Anderson turned away from me, cupped his hands round his mouth and roared.
“Masthead!”
The man who was straddled there next to the motionless figure of young Willis held up a hand as a sign that he had heard. Anderson lowered his hands from his mouth and “sang out” in what for him was more nearly a normal tone of voice.
“Is the boy dead?”
This time the man must have shouted back but his voice was not like the captain’s and what with the wind and sea, let alone the ship’s unsteady motion, I could not hear it. Thirty or more feet below him in the fighting top Lieutenant Benét—in a voice loud as the captain’s but a tenor to his bass—repeated what the man had said.
“Can’t rightly tell but he feels main cold.”
“Get him down then!”
Now there was a long pause and what looked like a wrestling match going on at the masthead while yet another seaman ascended, taking a tackle up with him. Willis lurched, so that I gasped as he swung free. But he was made
fast in a kind of seat. He was lowered down, turning and twisting on the end of the rope, now swinging out as we rolled and now coming in to thump the mast itself. Lieutenant Benét shouted.
“Bowse the man in there, you idle bugger!”
Willis was held and passed from one guiding hand to another. The duty watch or part of the watch who had stationed themselves in the rigging of the mainmast handled him as carefully as a woman with a baby. Lieutenant Benét slid all sixty feet down a rope from the fighting top and landed lightly on the deck.
“Handsomely does it!”
He knelt by the boy. Captain Anderson spoke from the forrard rail of the quarterdeck.
“Is he dead, Mr Benét?”
Benét swept off his hat with an elegant gesture, revealing what I had come to regard as far too much yellow hair as he did so.
“Not quite, sir. All right, lads. Get him down to the gunroom and roundly now!”
The little group disappeared down the ladders—or stairs, as I was more and more determined to call them—with Lieutenant Benét after them as confidently as if he were expert in medicine as in all else.
I turned to Mr Smiles, the sailing master, who had the watch.
“He looked dead to me.”
There was a fierce hiss from the captain. Once again I had violated his precious “standing orders” by speaking to the officer of the watch. But this time as if he was conscious that he was to blame in prolonging the boy’s punishment to the point of danger he turned with a grimace, which on the stage would have had a snarl in it, and went to his private quarters.
Mr Smiles had looked all round the horizon. Now he examined the set of our few sails.
“It is a time for dying.”
I was at once irritated and appalled. I believe myself to be wholly devoid of superstition but the words were—uncomfortable when spoken in a crippled and quite possibly sinking ship. I had been cheered by an improvement in the weather. For though we were now standing inexorably southward towards the polar seas, the weather seemed no worse than it might have been in the English Channel. I was about to differ with the man but my friend the first lieutenant, Charles Summers, appeared from the passenger lobby and climbed to the quarterdeck.
To the Ends of the Earth Page 44