“Yes. Now. During the day I recommend that you get at least four hours’ sleep to make up for what you are going to lose during the night. In fact, I believe I shall make that an order.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
He nodded, and went away. I sat for a while and was ridiculously excited. The prospect was like that of childhood, when the idea of staying up all night has a mysterious attraction about it—the experiencing of how one day actually changes into another. There was something—adult about it! There was an invitation to the world of men who are doing this strange thing not as a dare or discovery but because it is their duty. They are masters of the dark hours. It has about it something of the attraction of a secret society! Indeed, my main problem at the time seemed to be how to find occupation for myself between then and midnight. I ate a meal and heard from Bates all about the short commons to which we should soon be reduced. I smiled icily at Miss Granham in the lobby but she did not appear to notice. I “got my head down” since I was now a probationary seaman, as it were, with a prescriptive right to the language of the sea, and passed as much as two hours asleep of the four which Charles had stipulated. I settled down to write letters. I tried to compose one to Miss Chumley, the very sight of whom had turned my world and my future upside down, but could not say what I meant. For I could not say in so many words, “Are you corrupted?” Every time that lovely and innocent image came before the eyes of my heart, they refused to see what loathsome conjunction I tried to put before them. Besides, what was the use? There was no guarantee that the letter would ever be delivered. I abandoned the attempt, therefore, thought of writing verses instead, thought of Mr Benét’s verses, thought of Glaucus and Diomede, looked through my books, found the spine of Meditations among the Tombs was cracked and wondered how it had happened. I read the Iliad until my eyes were heavy. Stretched out in my bunk, I fell asleep again, and woke only when a voice spoke in my ear and the quartermaster shook me. The lamp was low and I turned it down to the veriest bud—then went out.
The ship was a ghost, a spirit of silver and ivory. Before me the pool of the waist was full of light to be waded through. I went out, and as I turned to go up the ladders the waxing moon blazed in my face. The sails were unbearable, their whiteness seeming to invade the very apple of the eyes. I climbed up and was overtaken by men trotting aft to stand at the wheel or as messengers with the officers of the watch. Charles came up the ladder and took over formally from Mr Cumbershum. The ship’s bell rang eight times.
“Mr Midshipman Talbot reporting for duty, sir.”
“It is good to have you here, Edmund. We might read by this light, don’t you think?”
“Easily. All the lanterns are out.”
“The central lantern is out, the quarter lanterns turned down as far as possible. We must conserve oil, as we must conserve so many things.”
I did not know what to say to this, for, as the illegal possessor and nominal purchaser of an oil lamp which at that moment was burning in my cabin, I felt the subject to be a delicate one.
“Where are we?”
“You mean our position? I wish I could tell you! We know our latitude if that is any comfort. It is all Columbus ever knew.”
“The longitude?”
“The chronometers—I beg you will keep this to yourself—can no longer be trusted. After this length of time the accumulation of their rates is ridiculous. Besides, water has been clean over them.”
“Did you not bring them up one deck?”
I thought Charles seemed a trifle uncomfortable at the memory.
“I—we—it might have been the thing to do. But it might have made matters worse. As far as the longitude is concerned we must consider it to be what you might call ‘assisted dead reckoning’.”
“With the accent on the ‘dead’!”
He thrust out a hand and grasped the rail—then snatched his hand away as if the wood had been hot.
“I should not have done that! In a grown man it is a vile superstition!”
“My dear fellow, you are too scrupulous. If touching wood is any comfort, why not touch wood, say I!”
“Well, there it is. Navigation is still an inexact art, though it may be improved. I cannot think how, though.”
“Could not the Admiralty co-opt Mr Benét? Or examine the works of Dean Swift a little more closely?”
“I do not know what Dean Swift has to do with navigation. As for Mr Benét, you are only too right. He believes he can find our longitude without relying on our three damp chronometers!”
“We are lost then!”
“No, no. We are somewhere in an area about ten miles broad and fifty miles long.”
“I call that being lost!”
“Well, you would. You are just like me when I was first a midshipman and felt my foot was on the rung of however short a ladder—for to be a lieutenant at that time seemed to me a notable achievement—”
“So it is, so it is.”
“My seamanship was learnt already, for there was little about the management of a ship I did not know. I am not boasting.”
“It is what Mr Gibbs told me the other day. ‘A son of a gun, every hair a rope yarn, every tooth a marline spike, every finger a fishhook and his blood Stockholm tar!’”
Charles laughed aloud.
“Hardly that! But I knew nothing of the theoretical and computational aspect of navigation. One morning the first lieutenant appeared with his own sextant. Mr Bellows, he was. We were in Plymouth Sound—this was before they built the breakwater, so we had a clear horizon to the south. Mr Bellows showed me how to handle the instrument. When he had done he said, ‘Now, Mr Summers. Oblige me by using this sextant to find out where we are by the time of local midday.’ ‘Why, Mr Bellows,’ said I, thinking he was having a game with me, ‘we are in Plymouth Sound.’ ‘Prove it,’ he said. ‘There’s this sextant, chronometers in the hold and Mr Smith will be kind enough to lend you his pocket watch.’ ‘But, Mr Bellows, sir,’ I said, ‘we’re at anchor!’ ‘You heard me,’ he said and went away.”
“You are remembering word for word!”
“Indeed it is written on my heart. You cannot think with what careful hands I held that precious instrument—no, Edmund, you cannot! It was not just a sextant. It was—I do not know how to say what I mean.”
“Believe me, I understand you.”
“I wonder. I am sure you try. But I took the height of the sun—oh, dozens of times, I think, both sides of midday. I am not a tremulous character, Edmund—”
“No indeed!”
“I believe I am rather stolid, in fact. But as the measurements increased then decreased, I really found it difficult to stop myself—crying, trembling, my teeth chattering or myself laughing out loud with whatever it was—No, you cannot possibly understand.”
“You had found your vocation.”
“There I was, picture me, taking the sun’s height again and again and young Smith noting down the time of each shot by his pocket watch—seconds first, then minutes, then the hour: and after that, the angle—seconds, minutes, degrees. Then I—Why labour it? I searched through Norie’s Epitome of Navigation. I revere that book next to the Bible, I believe.”
“I am all at sea in every way.”
“So I worked out our position, and yes, it was in Plymouth Sound! I laid it off on the chart—crossed lines, each about a tenth of an inch long and a circle drawn through them by means of the finest pencil in the ship. When Mr Bellows came aboard again I jumped out of the sailing master’s cabin, stood to attention and saluted. ‘If you please, Mr Bellows, I have worked out our position by means of the sextant, the chronometers and Norie.’ ‘Let me see,’ said he, ducking into the cabin where the chart was spread out on the table. ‘Lord, Mr Summers, have you a microscope? This is hardly visible to the naked eye. Spectacles will have to do, I suppose.’ He put on his spectacles and had another look. ‘That will be our quarterdeck,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t nailed this
cabin. Was you on the roof when you took the sight?’ ‘No, sir,’ I said.
“Then he felt through his pockets and fished out a stub of pencil as thick as his thumb. He held it more like a dagger than anything. He scrawled a huge circle round my ‘position’. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I think we can say we aren’t up on Dartmoor nor more than five miles outside the Eddystone Rocks, but where we are inside that circle the Lord Himself only knows.’”
“He was unkind.”
Charles laughed.
“Oh no. It was a lesson I did not like but I came to value it. I have passed the lesson on to young Tommy Taylor who stands in need of it and imagines we know latitude to the width of a plank, though otherwise he is your true ‘Son of a Gun’ and will do better than any of us in the service.”
“The lesson stressed the necessity for caution, I suppose.”
“Just so. And I have seldom found circumstances in the service where caution did not enable me to detect the correct line of duty.”
“That is why you do not want the foremast restored to use?”
“But I do want it restored! And if the wind fell away little by little to a flat calm—”
“Why little by little?”
“A sudden fall leaves a wild sea with no means of managing a ship in it. That would be no time for tampering with the shoring and staying of the mast.”
“This moonlight—one could bath in it—swim in it. Was there ever anything as beautiful? Nature is trying to seduce us into Belief in every possible way, into every possible philosophical anodyne.”
“I do not know the word.”
“When am I to learn celestial navigation?”
“That will have to wait, I am afraid.”
“I will study it ashore. But then I should have no horizon. Well—I will ride down to the sea.”
“You need not. You may take altitudes by measuring the angle between, let us say, the sun and its reflection in a bath of mercury.”
“And halve the angle! How ingenious!”
“You saw all that at once?”
“Why, it is obvious.”
“Young Willis does not find that sort of thing obvious, nor young Taylor, come to that.”
“Mr Benét, of course, would hardly need a sextant. He would use dead reckoning or build a mercury bath into it.”
“There is nothing wrong with dead reckoning if you know what you are doing. Mr Bellows could talk like a book when he wanted to and he had a sentence for that. He made me write it down in my log and learn it by heart. ‘More seamen have been surprised by the accuracy of dead reckoning than have ever been disconcerted by its imprecision.’”
“He could indeed speak like a book!”
We were interrupted by the necessity of having the log cast. This was done every hour and it became my duty solemnly to lift the canvas cover of the traverse board and write in the result. But now I took great interest in the process, though it soon became so habitual as to be unnoticeable. It was followed this first time by a long silence while neither of us felt any need to speak. Occasionally wide clouds obscured the moon but they were fleecy round the edges and gave us almost as much light as from the round of moon itself. I climbed to the poop and stared at our gentle wake. That “body”, which I had seen so laboriously carried up to the quarterdeck, now lay triced to the rail on the starboard quarter. A rope was attached to it—two ropes, in fact: and they led over the taffrail and down under the stern. Of course! One was the rope in the office of necessity—the other opposite—it was very mysterious. Suddenly our gentle wake burst into a splendour of diamonds. The moon was gliding out from the farther edge of a cloud. I turned back and went down to the quarterdeck where Charles stood by the stairs up to the poop. I was about to question him when I was interrupted.
“Charles—what was that?”
“It is the duty watch.”
“Singing?”
They were visible, not sheltering now under the rail or to leeward of a mast but grouped at the capstan on the fo’castle. They were leaning against it. The music—for such it was, harmony and all—drifted about us, gentle as the wake and the wind, magic as the moonlight. I went forward to the rail of the quarterdeck and leaned over it, listening. As if they had seen and were glad of an audience they seemed to turn—or at least I had the impression of many moon-blanched faces looking my way—and the volume of sound increased.
“What is it, Edmund?”
Charles had come and stood beside me.
“The music!”
“Just the duty watch.”
They were silent. Someone had emerged from the fo’castle and was speaking to them. Evidently the concert was over. But there were still the moon and stars and the glitter of the sea.
“How awesome to think that we actually use all that up there—make use of the stars and refer to the sun as habitually as to a signpost!”
Charles spoke hesitantly and, it seemed, a little shyly.
“No man can contemplate it without being put in mind of his Maker.”
A cloud was swallowing the moon again. The water and the ship were dulled.
“The concept is naïve surely. When I consult my repeater I do not invariably think of the man who made it!”
He looked round at me. He wore a mask of moonlight as I suppose I did. He spoke with due solemnity.
“When I consider the heavens the work of Thy fingers, the moon and stars which Thou hast ordained—”
“But that is poetry! Milton could do no better!”
“The psalms are prose, surely.”
“Yet why should putting something into poetry make it truer than if it was in figures, as in your Mr Norie?”
“You are too clever for me, Edmund.”
“I did not mean to be—oh, what a gross impertinence! Forgive me!”
“Was I insulted? I did not feel it. There is a difference between the sky and a pocket watch.”
“Yes, yes. That is true. I was making a debating point which I suppose is one of the more detestable results of a gentleman’s education. Poetry itself is a mystery—so is prose—so is everything—I used to think of poetry as an entertainment. It is more, far more. Oh, Charles, Charles, I am so deeply, so desperately, so deeply, deeply in love!”
(8)
Charles Summers was silent. The masks of moonlight which were hiding our faces made the night-time confession inevitable. It had burst from me without my volition.
“You say nothing, Charles. Have I annoyed you? I beg your pardon for mixing what must seem a trivial matter in all this going on round us—mixing it too into talk of the religion which is your deepest concern. In fact I do not know why you should be so kind as to listen to me. But so you are.”
The first lieutenant went to the wheel and talked with the men there. He stared long into the binnacle. I wondered if anything was wrong, but after a few minutes he came back to me slowly.
“It is the young lady you met aboard Alcyone.”
“Who else could it be?”
He seemed to brood. Then—
“Who else indeed? I have no doubt she is as virtuous as lovely—”
“Do not make virtue sound so elderly! But is it to be joy or wormwood?”
“I do not understand.”
“A certain person engaged in, in fornication with a certain woman—She, Marion Chumley, stood guard, must have consented, must have seen, must have been a part of—Oh, it squeezes my heart to think of it!”
“You cannot mean—”
“If she took however passive a part she is wholly unlike the person I saw, met, talked with. And on top of that I am bound for Sydney Cove and she for Calcutta! The world could hardly thrust people farther apart. You cannot know what it is like.”
“I know the young lady, at all events. I saw her. You remember how, since I do not dance, I elected to take the watch for the period of the entertainment and ball? I saw you dancing together.”
“Well?”
“What do you expect me to say?
”
“I do not know.”
“I saw her next day too, early. She had come to the starboard quarter of Alcyone and was staring through the side of our ship as if she could see what was going on inside. You were inside, unconscious or delirious. She was wondering about you.”
“How do you know?”
“Who else?”
“Benét?”
He made a dismissive gesture.
“Not in a thousand years.”
“Who told you?”
“No one. I know, you see.”
“Oh, you are making up speeches to comfort me!”
There was a smile, as it were, in Charles’s voice.
“This, then, is the young lady ‘perhaps ten or twelve years younger than myself, a lady of family, wealth—’”
“Did I say so? Before I met her it is certainly how I used to think in my nasty, calculating way. You must despise me.”
“No.”
He walked to the rail and stood for a while, looking over the side. At last he came back and leaned against the break of the poop.
“The moon is going down.”
There was singing again from the fo’castle, very soft. I spoke too, but as softly.
“You know, however long I live I shall remember the middle watch. I shall think of it as a kind of—island—out of this world—made of moonlight—a time for confidences when men can say to a—transmuted face what they would never bring out in the daytime.”
He was silent again.
“Think, Charles, had Deverel not slipped below for a drink we should not have lost our topmasts and she would have spent her life in ignorance of me!”
He laughed abruptly.
“You would have been ignorant of each other! There I saw a glimpse of the old ‘Lord Talbot’.”
“Are you puckering up there in the shadow of the poop? But it makes no sense. We might have met conveniently in a drawing room. Instead of which—Will she lapse once more into that dream of girlhood until some other—Oh no, it cannot be!”
“She will not forget you.”
“It is good of you to say so.”
To the Ends of the Earth Page 51