Charles spoke again.
“Very well, Robinson. Carry on.”
He turned to me.
“Are you going down?”
“Are not you?”
“Oh, I have more work to do. I suppose it will be the middle before I turn in.”
“Well then—yes, I will go down. Good night, Charles.”
I made my reluctant way down to the lobby. There was now a lantern fixed to the mizzenmast just above the copy of the captain’s standing orders, in its glass-fronted case. Someone had left two huge piles of rope beneath it. I opened the door of my hutch and stepped inside. By holding it open I had enough light from the lantern in the lobby to allow me to find my way round. I fumbled in the top drawer, got out my tinderbox and contrived to light the lantern I had bought from Phillips. I shut the door and sat in my canvas chair. I have to confess that already I was feeling something like one feels when bracing oneself to leap into cold water—very cold water. I stripped off my oilskins and my seaboots more slowly than an ancient. I remember bending to my boots as if the effort were painful and the business impossibly long. But at last I was in my “slops”. There was still a way of postponing the unpleasant moment. I went to our office of necessity on the starboard side, turned up the blue bud of the oil lamp fixed to the bulkhead, adjusted my trowsers and sat on the nearer of our two holes to the door. Scarcely had I settled myself when the door opened and a petty officer of huge dimensions edged himself in.
“Well, damn my soul!”
“Sorry, sir!”
“Get out!”
“First lieutenant’s orders, sir.”
The man inserted a rope’s end into the farther hole and proceeded to pay it out. I pulled up my trowsers in a rage, buckled the belt and flung myself out. There were more seamen in the lobby. A rope was creeping from the pile past my feet. Another rope was creeping in a like manner into the “female” offices of necessity on the larboard quarter. The place had gone mad. A young seaman, clad as I was in nothing but slops, came quickly out of the larboard office and ran to Miss Granham’s door! This was the outside edge of enough! I got to him in a stride or two and had him by the shoulder.
“No, you don’t, my lad!”
I spun him round—good God! It was Miss Granham! Her face, even in the dim light from the lantern, was scarlet.
“Let me go, sir, at once, sir!”
“Miss Granham!”
My hand had sprung from her thin shoulder as if it had touched a snake. An unnoticed heave caught me off balance. Miss Granham grabbed the knob of her door handle. I somersaulted backwards and was only saved from mortal injury by those same coils of rope which though diminished were still enough to break my fall. I was on my knees and scrabbled back towards her.
“Pray, Miss Granham—pray, Miss Granham—forgive me—I thought you was a seaman who intended you some harm—allow me—I will close your—”
“I cannot close it myself, Mr Talbot, while you have your hand on the sill. You have an uncommon knack of falling about, sir! Far be it from me to offer advice—”
“I do not hurt myself on these occasions, ma’am. But I should value your advice on anything.”
She paused, her back to me, her door half-open.
“Sarcasm, Mr Talbot?”
The fall had warmed my temper.
“Why am I always misunderstood?”
She turned back. I continued.
“You do not comment, ma’am. During this voyage, people’s opinions of their associates and companions have been modified—must have been—modified! That is as true of me as of anyone. What I said was a simple expression of the truth of—of my respect and for your—your—”
“My years, young man?”
She had swung round completely to face me. In the dim light the ravages of time on her handsome face were not visible. She was smiling and a lock of hair had escaped from the scarf in which the rest was confined and lay across her face. She put it up, and some trick of the half-light made her look as young as I, if not younger! My mouth opened and shut. I swallowed.
“No, ma’am.”
“Let us be acquainted all over again then, Mr Talbot. Indeed, it falls pat. It would perhaps make you less indifferent to where and how you fall—Now, do not pucker up, sir! Hear me out! You may take more care of yourself if you see what the result of a fall can be. Mr Prettiman wishes to see you. I—the fact is, I recommended him to ask someone else. I see that perhaps I was wrong.”
I believe I laughed.
“Mr Prettiman wishes to see me? Good God!”
“So, if you agree, I will call you to him tomorrow morning.”
“I do agree, ma’am. Nothing would give me greater pleasure!”
The lock of hair had fallen once again. She put it up, frowning.
“Why do you say that, Mr Talbot? Is it the kind of remark you scatter among the members of my sex?”
I made a gesture of dissent. But quickly the smile returned.
“You do not answer, Mr Talbot. Nor should you. You find me minatory. I see the thought which is forming at the back of your mind, ‘Once a governess, always a governess.’ I was at fault, sir, and curtsey as you observe like the veriest milkmaid.”
With that she closed the door. I stayed where I was, holding on to the rail, and I was bemused. There was no doubt about it. Miss Granham had the capacity to reduce a person to his constituent parts, apparently without trying! But we were—she had said so!—acquaintances once more. I do not believe myself quarrelsome and the change filled me with unusual relief and pleasure. I went to the entry to the waist and looked out. The deck was moon-drenched, white. Those stars that the moon had not quenched swung in great curves through the rigging like silver bees. I stared up at them until I was dizzy. I blinked and looked down. Men were coming aft, working their way along a bouncing lifeline, for they carried a heavy burden which seemed to make them unhandy. They laboured up to the quarterdeck with what appeared to be the body of some recently killed animal and large at that. Charles came hurrying along, unburdened, did not see me and went rapidly up the stairs after the men. I turned away and went into my hutch and shut the door behind me. I looked at the freshly made-up bunk with disfavour. There was no doubt about it. Coming back to this hutch was going to be a trial. It was like the time when I was a boy riding by the churchyard in the dusk on a pony which took me indifferently too near the graves. So now. However I had supposed the world and human life to be arranged, I found an air, an atmosphere in this hutch to which I had condemned myself! I seemed to breathe unease. True, compared with the light of the candle to which I was accustomed a degree of brilliance blazed from my oil lamp, which hung steady by the wall, while the wall moved and shadows drawn in black ink raced over me as the ship moved under us. I turned down the wick until only a glimmer of light was left. I told myself that I would not undress for a while but wait until familiarity had made the place a little more mine than—theirs. Is not a cure for a burnt finger to hold it next to a fire so that the heat is drawn out? Then Colley had sat here. His elbow, pen, inkwell, sander—here he had known the extremes of dread and sorrow, of humiliation, mortification—experience of a misery beyond the power of my imagination! If that misery, that whirlpool of human suffering had drained away without trace, as my reason told me, why suddenly was there a winter on my skin? Why was this cabin different from the last time I had slept here? I came up from that state, muttering something about a poor boy who had too much sensibility—or in other words too much blue funk! That made me grin but with what must have been little more than a grimace. To “share the common lot of the other passengers who would one day be part of my care”! That was a noble sentiment. I found myself speaking out loud.
“In future, my boy, avoid noble sentiments. They are like drawing a card blind. You may get anything from the joker to the—”
Nevertheless I am a rational man.
The day had been long. Sleep ought to have been easy. Yet I did not chuse to throw off
my garments and get at once into the bunk. A naked man is defenceless. He cannot run naked out onto a moon-drenched deck. Not unless he is delirious. Well, thought I, I will do myself the kindness of going little by little. I lay down, fully dressed in my slops, on the coverlet of the bunk. I lay on my back. The eyebolt was inches from my face. I shut my eyes but was provoked by the slight intimations of light and shadow passing over them. I opened my eyes, therefore, and determining to ignore the eyebolt, focused my eyes on the white-painted deckhead. I found myself examining in detail the wounded underside of a deckbeam, a hole with a pointed thing in the bottom.
I turned over and lay on my face, but the roll of the ship and the occasional pitch made me lurch uncomfortably. I fumbled for the side of the bunk with one hand and at the side of the ship with the other. My fingers took hold. It was the eyebolt, of course. The hair of my head sprang erect. There was an instant in which I might have flung myself from the bunk and rushed away to find Charles or someone, anyone warm and living who breathed and spoke! Yet in that fearful instant I made up my mind and stayed where I was, the fierceness of my clutch making my whole body tremble. Eyes shut, I stayed there, in the very position of the dying man, and was as cold as he.
The change was gradual. The petrifaction of fear diminished into unease, then into a greyness of consent. Thus it had been. Thus it was.
There was a moan from somewhere, from Prettiman in his bunk. I let go the eyebolt and turned over on my back. The wounded deckbeam had less to say to me. I shut my eyes.
I did not experience the passage from waking to sleeping. But it seems that at some point before the coming of the light I must have fallen into a kind of sleep or trance or place.
He was saying something. His voice was far away. A familiar voice, choked with sobbing. I could not place the voice but knew I must. Who in the name of God? I was in a place lit by a savage light which leapt and sank, again and again. The voice drew nearer.
“You could have saved us.”
The voice was my own voice. I was awake, the flame was leaping and sinking behind the glass of the lantern. I turned it out and lay back, waiting for the dawn.
(6)
When the dawn came I dressed thoughtfully enough. But life must go on and even the sadness of self-knowledge cannot come wholly between a man and his stomach!
The passenger saloon was deserted except for little Pike. He sat under the window, his arms folded on the table, his head on them. I thought he was drunk again but as I entered he looked up, smiled sleepily, then put his head down. So there was another cabin in which people found it difficult to be at ease! I got myself a mug of small ale from Bates—there was nothing else to have—and drank “breakfast” quite in the antique manner. I went back to my hutch and got into my oilskins and seaboots and was about to go into the waist but saw old Mr Brocklebank standing there in the shadow of the larboard main chains. He had usurped my place. I sat in my canvas chair then, all oilskinned as I was, and surveyed my few books on the shelf at the end of the bunk. I remembered Charles and his gift of the slops that I was wearing. I took down the Iliad, therefore, and read in book zeta the story of Glaucus and Diomede. They had exchanged armour recklessly, it seemed, trading bronze armour for gold. I could not decide whether my determination to see Charles promoted was gold or bronze—certainly his care of me, getting me bathed and changed as if he were my old nurse, was gold in the circumstances! I read on but soon found the words drifting apart. It had been a short and troubled night. I remembered that Charles had told me not to wear my oilskins except to keep myself dry so I put the book back and went out to the waist. Mr Brocklebank had gone. I stayed in the lee of the main chains to allow the wind to freshen me.
Mr Benét came briskly out of the lobby.
“Well, Mr Talbot, we get on!”
“This weather is still too lively to allow you to tamper—I should say to mend, the foremast?”
“For the time being. But the wind moderates. And fortunately the movement does not prevent Coombs from making charcoal.”
“Stay, sir. A moment. I have heard that in an emergency masts may be cut away.”
“You have been speaking to the first lieutenant!”
“Indeed I have, but he said nothing of that. It is my own idea—cut away the foremast and you save yourself the risk of mending the shoe! I do have occasional ideas, you know.”
“I am sure you do, sir. But if we cut away the foremast we should probably have to cut away the mizzenmast to balance things. Nor do masts fall precisely where you mean them to. Imagine the foremast going over the side, still tethered to the ship, and dragging her round so she broached to! We might be overset and swamped in seconds. Bravo, Mr Talbot, but no, sir. That will not do. The moment it is possible we shall crimp the shoe and draw it together. Bite your nails a watch or two longer.”
I did not like his tone but there seemed nothing I could do about that. However, we did have interests in common—
Benét was moving away. I hastened after him.
“I had meant to ask you, sir, to explain a certain episode in which you and Lady Somerset and Miss Chumley—”
“Later, Mr Talbot. Oh, this weather! It makes a man want to sing!”
He ran swiftly along the deck and vanished into the fo’castle between one roll and the next. Charles emerged from the lobby. A petty officer and two seamen came with him. He paused when he saw me.
“Well, Edmund?”
“A bad night, I am afraid.”
“There is little colour in your face. Are you feeling the motion?”
“No. I have had a bad night, that is all.”
“You could return to the wardroom.”
I felt myself flushing, for it was evident that he understood something of my “bad night”.
“And be laughed at? No.”
“In discomfort and danger people are glad of something to laugh at.”
“So we are still in danger?”
He turned to the petty officer and gave him an order. The man knuckled his forehead and the little party cantered—doubled, I suppose I should say—along the deck to the fo’castle.
“Yes, Edmund. We are in the same danger as before.”
“At least the weather is improving.”
“My dear fellow! This is a pause and will give Benét time to tamper with the foremast. I do not like the look of the weather. There is something big up there which will search us out. Well, I must get on.”
“Let me come with you.”
“No no. You cannot. My rounds are not for you.”
He saluted in the naval manner and went forward along the deck. The lifelines were not so much bouncing now as vibrating gently. Charles ignored them.
“Mr Talbot.”
I turned. Miss Granham, in slops and seaboots too big for her, was standing in the entry to the lobby.
“Good morning, ma’am. What can I do for you?”
“I wanted to call you to Mr Prettiman. Is the time convenient?”
“To visit him? Of course, ma’am, whenever you wish.”
She opened his door a crack, looked in, then shut it again.
“He has fallen asleep again. It is the paregoric. Perhaps—”
She seemed doubtful. But I could see no reason for delay.
“May I not go in and wait?”
“If you wish.”
I entered Prettiman’s cabin and pulled the door to behind me. The cabin was like all the others, a bunk, a shelf for books, a canvas washbowl with a small mirror over it and, at the other end, a writing flap with the usual accoutrements. There was a bucket under the washbowl and a canvas chair before the writing flap. Mr Prettiman had signalled his eccentricity by sleeping the wrong way round—his head was towards the stern, his feet towards the bow. His head was, in consequence, just above the bucket, which may have been his original intention in sleeping that way round. Certainly I had vivid and miserable memories of our first weeks in the ship and the nausea which had overcome me and the
other passengers.
Prettiman was so deeply asleep that it was hard to believe he had been awake that morning. The air was thick, as must be the air of all sickrooms, I suppose, since fresh air is so deleterious to a troubled body. Though it was not to be thought that our ladies, accustomed as they must be to the treatment of childish ailments, would leave the sufferer unwashed, there was a distinct odour emanating from the man which made a close approach to him distasteful. I realized with a resigned determination that I was in for an unpleasant enough experience. However, I daresay that the hardly describable events of the night had made me a little more aware of my offhand ability to spread destruction! I sat down cautiously, therefore, with a vague feeling that as long as he slept I was doing what Miss Granham required by being present. The odour from his body strove with another which I had no difficulty in identifying as paregoric, or laudanum. No wonder he slept. The bedclothes were pulled up to his neck. His bald head was dinted into a pillow far softer than the one which had been provided for me. His face above the tawny beard and scanty fringe of hair was very pale. It was a face I had seen often enough comically reddened by passionate anger. This mask of flesh and bone on which his emotions were so often played out for all to see was irregular enough. The tilted nose was as far from his long upper lip as that of a stage Irishman, a Paddy. His mouth was wide and firm, so that the lines of determination as well as anger were engraved there. Sickness had wasted his flesh and removed a great deal of the comedy. Those eyes which could glare in all the madness of social bigotry were veiled by dark lids and sunk deep under the frantic eyebrows. It was perhaps possible to laugh at the waking man. But this effigy, stretched as on the slab of a tomb, had nothing of the laughable. Where was ludicrous Prettiman, opinionated, sometimes frantic, indignant beside his unlikely fiancée? But she had suffered a like sea change without the trouble of a fall, a severe spinster, now seen to be handsome, dignified and sensible—and feminine! Why, the man himself—there came a ninth wave in our diminishing weather, for the cabin lurched. That same cry which I had heard when I was awake in the cabin off the wardroom—that cry which had drawn me forth—the anguish—woe—I sprang to my feet. It was not to be borne. I saw myself condemned to sit in this stink and be exacerbated time after time as the man woke and that cry burst out! I seized the door handle—
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