So this, then, was the beginning of what for me was the strangest adventure of our long voyage. Still battered but in weather that seemed never to rise above the level of a favourable gale we sped eastward towards our goal and life was irradiated by the nature of them both—for sometimes she would bring her canvas chair and sit by me while I read to him. They were quite unlike any people I had ever met before! He was donnish; but there was nothing laughable about him unless it was his capacity for explosive anger. Beyond that his mind ranged vastly through the universe of space and time as it did through the other universe of books! And she, following his lead but not scrupling to differ from him and sometimes leading us where we had not thought to go! The Crown, the principle of hereditary honours, the dangers of democracy, Christianity, the family, war—indeed there were times when it seemed to me that I threw off my upbringing as a man might let armour drop around him and stand naked, defenceless, but free!
Then after a doze in the evening I would spend the middle with Charles, bring ideas to him and test them against his absolute integrity. I found in truth that I had never examined an idea before! To have read Plato and not tested an idea! It sounds impossible, but it is not, for I had done it.
(17)
It could not have been more than a day or two after I had become acquainted with Mr Prettiman that I noticed a change in Charles. He was more silent than before. At first I thought that he was concerned with the state of the ship but it was not so. The fact was, he found my sudden esteem for the social philosopher strange, not to say incomprehensible. Charles did not generalize. He would not examine the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity but dismissed that modern trio because of the way they had been applied among the Gallic Race by the medium of the guillotine and the splendid wickedness of the Corsican! Always his mind moved at once to the practical.
“You will do yourself no good with the governor of a penal colony, Edmund, by tossing such ideas about as if you approved of them!”
The truth is, Charles was well enough where he was. Unlike mine, his ideas had been tested in the fire of his religion, Prettiman’s in the cruelties and torments of social condemnation, derision, dislike. It was not more than a very few days after I had begun to read and discuss with the Prettimans that I taxed Charles with his silences. His reply—if in unconscious sympathy with him I may revert to Tarpaulin—brought me up, all standing.
“You are moving away from me, Edmund. That is all.”
I seized him by the arm.
“No! Never!”
But it was true nevertheless. I liked him as much, would do for him as much. But set in the foreground of the world which Prettiman was opening to me, Charles was—diminished. I understood his practical approach, his anxious grasp of his position in the ship, his battle with jealousy and spite, his devotion to the customs of the sea service which would not allow him to criticize his captain even when his captain was wrong! I saw, and admired, his simple goodness. Surely, I told myself, that is enough? I thought of the way he found me dry clothing at a time when it seemed a miracle in that soaked ship. Thinking thus, it was then I first realized how he had contrived to free me from my haunted hutch for four hours of every night. Then I would remember Glaucus and Diomede, the bronze armour Charles had given me and the gold armour I had sworn to give him! The only armour which Charles would find golden would be promotion to post captain.
Yet Charles? I had no doubt at all of his courage. His knowledge of the economy of a ship was complete. Yet Charles, a ship’s husband, in command of a ship, a warship with the future of our world in his hands?
I did dare to put my problem before Mr and Mrs Prettiman. Prettiman bade me undertake the exercise of untwisting the affair back to where it had started, and I understood at last that I had simply promised more than I could or should promise or perform. Mr Prettiman declined to help.
“You must, of course, do what you think is right. If you do not believe he is worth making post you must tell him so.”
Of course I could not tell him! Who was I to do so? The result was there were now periods of silence from me during the middle watch as well as silence from Charles. Oh that voyage towards which I had looked as a simple adventure! What ramifications it had, what effects on the mind, the nature, what excitement, what sad learning, what casual tragedies and painful comedies in our rendering old hulk! What shaming self-knowledge! For brooding on my problem I even imagined one saying in the future—when my naval client had at last demonstrated his inadequacy as a post captain—that was one of Talbot’s recommendations, you know. Sometimes I thought, and bitterly enough, that the only human quality to the depths of which there could be no limit was my personal meanness!
My broodings were interrupted by another twist in our society. It was the question of our longitude. I had known that Benét and the captain were immersed in some high theory of navigation but had not thought much about it. A glum Bowles brought me up to date. He illustrated in water spilt on the saloon table the problem before the captain. Sooner or later we must approach the new continent. But though we knew where we were to larboard or starboard, so to speak, we could not define our position fore and aft! In a sentence, without an accurate knowledge of our longitude we might hit land before we saw it! The solution adopted by seamen in earlier days had been to heave to during the hours of darkness and only advance when there was light enough. Naturally, this was a luxury which our captain could not afford with a crew on half rations and only those with good teeth able to profit by what was left. Add to our uncertainty the circumpolar current which might or might not be helping us towards our destination and it will be seen what an added exacerbation was inflicted on me by Lieutenant Benét’s confident assertion that he could find our longitude without a chronometer. I put aside my dislike of the man and, knowing the time of his watch, waylaid him from my usual position by the main chains.
“A word with you, sir.”
“A challenge?”
“Not at the moment—”
“Ah! So we are back on conversational terms, are we?”
“This matter of the longitude and the chronometers—”
“I thought it was pistols. Good God, Mr Talbot! Do you suppose Captain Cook carried chronometers with him?”
“Of course!”
“Well, he did not!”
With that, he leapt away up the stairs as the duty watch set about its four-hourly dance during the minute or two before the bell rang out. I followed him but already he was deep in talk with Anderson. Even when the watch was changed and Mr Askew descended from the quarterdeck, Benét and Anderson talked on about the moons of Jupiter! They bandied astronomy as if it were a ball game—eclipses, parallax, perigee and apogee—I began to have an uneasy feeling that they were both aware of me and were deliberately keeping me out!
“Lunar distance, Mr Benét. Agreed. But the check—”
“The passage of Calypso. We shall present it to their lordships—the Anderson-Benét method!”
Anderson laughed aloud! He did!
“No no! It is all yours, my boy!”
“No, sir—I insist!”
“Well. You had better make it work first.”
The message was plain. Even so, the contrast between this excited pair—whether their “method” was practicable or not—and poor dear, dutiful Charles was so clear as to be painful. I stood, ostensibly watching the waves, until I was heartily tired of it. But the two men continued to ignore me and at last there was nothing left for me to do but go away. It was one of those defeats which are so easy to describe in their outward event and so impossible to sum up in their total effect. I went below, knowing that I had been set aside in a matter which concerned not just the Navy but every man, woman and child in the ship. It would have needed more than all the assurance with which I had entered the ship to break in and interrupt them; but I could not think precisely why.
I went cautiously down the ladders, for the ship was moving more that day. Water was coming
aboard even into the waist, which fact would once have seemed notable to me though now it was common enough. Clear water was running inches deep with every roll over the planking newly scoured from Charles’s oil—planking from between which, as some unhandy configuration of the sea passed under us, the spewed oakum flopped this way and that like worms in a flooded field. I was making my moody way to the saloon when I saw old Mr Brocklebank open the door, his legs wide apart, his tall and portly figure wrapped in the dirty coach cloak, and I decided that I wanted no closer acquaintance with him. I went to Mr Prettiman’s door therefore and asked if I might read to him. He was glad to see me, he said, for he had passed a wakeful night now that the paregoric or laudanum was exhausted. He was not in pain but ached, he said, which was wearisome. I thought he looked a little feverish, for there was colour now high on his cheekbones and his eyes seemed unnaturally bright. He would not have me read to him. He said he would be unable to fix his attention. He wanted instead to know what the state of the ship was. He said he could feel that the weather had worsened again. I told him that the water was indeed moving about a little more but that we were getting along capitally. I went on to say—and now Mrs Prettiman entered—that the great political point in the ship was Mr Benét’s proposal to find the longitude without reference to the chronometers. I laughed as I said this and Mrs Prettiman agreed with me, saying that she understood the use of the globes, having had to instruct the young in their value. Without exact knowledge of the time at the Greenwich meridian no ingenuity on earth could discover our longitude.
“You are wrong, Letitia.”
She was as disconcerted as I.
“Benét said that Captain Cook had no chronometer.”
“He is right, Edmund. The angular distance between the moon and the sun was used to find longitude before the invention or the perfecting, rather, of the chronometer. The defect of the method was the skill required in making use of it.”
“So Benét is right again!”
“Anderson took his proposal seriously?”
“Very seriously, I thought—even excitedly. But then, anything which our naval Adonis proposes is certain of an enthusiastic reception from that quarter.”
Mrs Prettiman opened her mouth to speak but shut it again. Prettiman frowned up at the deckhead a few inches above his face.
“Anderson is no fool. I am told he is a complete seaman.”
“So is Mr Summers, sir. Mr Summers says—”
I heard my voice trail off into silence. It was broken presently by Mrs Prettiman.
“We are all indebted to Mr Summers, Mr Talbot. His care of us and the ship.”
“He is brave, too, ma’am. Why, in the last dreadful storm among those mountains of water he managed the wheel with his own hands and alone in the greatest danger! It might have killed him!”
Mr Prettiman cleared his throat.
“No one doubts that the first lieutenant is everything you say. But, you see, I do not think you have experienced the difference between a man who has a natural aptitude for the mathematics and one who has not. The difference is absolute—a matter not of quantity but of quality.”
I had nothing to say to that. Mrs Prettiman spoke:
“I am told that you helped Mr Summers at the wheel, sir. It seems I am always, as a lady, in the position of expressing my gratitude to you.”
“Oh, Lord, ma’am! It was nothing! Nothing at all—”
“Since there have been times when I have had to express other feelings and opinions I am happy to tell you that I believe your conduct was admirable and most manly!”
But Mr Prettiman was turning his head from side to side on the pillow.
“I cannot envisage the method—will he use the passage of a satellite as a check? But how? It is not so easy—”
“Aloysius, my dear, should you not try to sleep? I am sure Mr Talbot—”
“Of course, ma’am, I will go at once—”
“Stay, Edmund. What is the hurry? I am well enough in my mind, Letty, and see their Heavens as clearly as I see you! A man is seldom better employed than in their contemplation!”
“I believe you should not excite yourself, sir.”
“‘This majestical roof, fretted with golden fire—’”
“If it comes to that, sir—‘The floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.’”
“Does Mr Benét see them so through his sextant?”
“The young man is a poet, Aloysius. Is that not so, Mr Talbot?”
“He writes verses, ma’am, as who does not?”
“You?”
“Only in Latin, ma’am. I dare not reveal my scanty thoughts in the nudity and plainness of English speech.”
“I am really rather impressed, Mr Talbot.”
“Since I have you at a temporary disadvantage, ma’am, may I beg you to follow Mr Prettiman’s example and address me as ‘Edmund’?”
I thought she looked disconcerted at the suggestion. I was bold enough to press her still further.
“After all, ma’am, it is not improper in view of your—that is to say, in view of my—your—”
She burst out laughing.
“In view of my age, you mean? Edmund, my dear boy, you are quite, quite inimitable!”
“We were having a rational discussion, Letitia. Where was I?”
“You and Edmund were exchanging quotations so as to get the universe on a proper literary footing.”
“What could be better than ascending from the trivial matter of our exact position on this globe to a contemplation of the universe into which we have been born?”
“And which, sir, is more truly revealed by poetry than prose!”
“Aloysius may agree with you, Edmund, but I am a plain woman.”
“You do yourself less than justice, Letty. But, Edmund—continue.”
“It is only that—little by little during this voyage, for one reason and another, poetry—has become open to me not as entertainment, as mere beauty—but as a loftiness—man at full stretch—then at night, with the stars—with preposterous Nature—I am half-ashamed to admit it—”
“Oh, look, boy, look! Can the whole be less than good? If it cannot—why, then good is what it must be! Can you not see the gesture, the evidence, the plain statement there, the music—as they used to say, the cry, the absolute! To live in conformity with that, each man to take it to him and open himself to it—I tell you, Edmund, there is not a poor depraved criminal in the land towards which we are moving who could not, by lifting his head, gaze straight into the fire of that love, that χάρις of which we spoke!”
“Criminals?”
“Imagine our caravan, we, a fire down below here—sparks of the Absolute—matching the fire up there—out there! Moving by cool night through the deserts of this new land towards Eldorado with nothing between our eyes and the Absolute, our ears and that music!”
“Yes. I see. It would be—the adventure of adventures!”
“You could come too, you know, Edmund. Anyone could come. There is nothing to stop you!”
“Your leg, sir. You are forgetting it, I believe.”
“I am not. It will heal. I know it will. The fire in me will heal me. I know it will! I will go!”
“But do as Mrs Prettiman wishes, sir, and keep your body still.”
“But you will come!”
I said nothing. It was a silence that grew, lengthened until the very noise of the water hissing past our hull sounded like some wordless voice; and at last I knew that it did not need words and was something even closer to me than words themselves. It was the cold, plain awareness which we call common sense.
And yet I really had seen! For a time, in that increasingly fetid hutch, I had felt the power of the man, that attraction of his passion. I had even glimpsed, or thought I glimpsed, our universe as a bubble afloat in the uncommensurable golden sea of the Absolute, the myriad sparks of fire, each the jewel in the head of an animal which could “look up”.
&
nbsp; They were both watching me. My fists clenched themselves and the perspiration burst out on my forehead. It was an astonishing kind of shame, I think—shame at my inability to say quite simply, “Yes, I will come.” There was, too, a degree of anger at finding myself so suddenly pushed up against a wall, held up as it were by some philosophical highwayman with poetry in one hand and astronomy in the other! At last I looked from his flushed face, his expectant eyes, to Mrs Prettiman. She lowered hers and looked at her hands—not the way a seaman does, inspecting his palms, but looking at the backs and the nails. She glanced at her husband.
“I believe you should try to sleep, Aloysius.”
I stood up unhandily, swaying against the movement of the vessel.
“I will read to you tomorrow, sir.”
He frowned as if the concept were strange to him.
“Read? Oh yes, of course!”
I tried to smile at Mrs Prettiman, but fear it was a sad grimace, and felt my way out of the cabin. I had not shut the door behind me before I heard her murmur to him. I cannot tell what she said.
I told myself that other occasions would occur in which we might renew the conversation, continue what felt like the rising curve of our intimacy. I wished with a spontaneous passion not unlike his that I might be their friend. Yet I saw already that the price was impossibly high. I am after all a political animal with my spark, my—if I may descend to the language fit for sergeants—my scintillans Dei, well hidden. I suppose the excuse to be presented to the Absolute is that I did and do sincerely wish to exercise power for the betterment of my country: which of course, and fortunately in the case of England, is for the benefit of the world in general. Let that never be forgotten.
That same night it was, the quartermaster shook me awake a little early. I went to the poop therefore, under a starry sky which was fleeced with moonlit clouds, and waited for Charles to appear. I have to confess that I did scan the sky and was, I think, alive to its transcendent beauty but could not elevate myself to see Mr Prettiman’s Good, nor his Absolute. The truth is that while logic compels no belief passion does so quite easily, and it was Mr Prettiman’s passion which convinced: so that when he was not there—but why labour the point? His painful presence was needed. Without it I could remember the occasion but not re-create the feeling, the—dare I say—perception. I felt a little rueful I must confess at not being the stuff of which followers are made—and a touch of pain when I felt that Mrs Prettiman had been disappointed in me. I was more than ever glad therefore when Charles appeared. He was cool however. For a time we were silent, standing side by side, each unable to begin. When we did, it was with such a collision that we both burst out laughing.
To the Ends of the Earth Page 61