“Charles! Charles!”
I jumped the gap between the quay and the ship. Later, when I saw how wide it was, I took myself to task for attempting anything so silly.
“Here!”
He glanced at the paper, then back at the work in progress.
“Not now, Edmund! If I take my eye off the unloading there’ll be a fight, before you blink!”
“Read it, man! You must read it!”
He glanced at the form, then back at the work in hand; then swung round and faced the paper squarely. He seemed prepared to look at it endlessly, his mouth open and his eyes anxious. I unrolled the paper and held it so he could read. The colour drained from his face, he put out a hand and sat down heavily. So that was my golden armour!
I found, when Charles had recovered and we were sitting by a bare cot in the captain’s deserted quarters, that a junior captain’s status is signified by one epaulette worn on the right shoulder. The dear old fellow was very bashful in his confession but finally told me that he did in fact have a single epaulette stored away—stowed away—which I thought a quite extraordinary and touching indication of what had been a modest yet hopeful character! He was changed by the voyage, as we all were, and I could only hope that time would restore to him the simplicity and amiability which had once been so evident in him. I begged him to come ashore but he would not.
“Before you know it they would be playing pranks or truant. The men would get careless and then somebody would have a bale dropped on him. There is more in this unloading than you dream of. I can only be thankful the voyage was so lengthened that we have no strong drink left in her.”
I wondered for a moment whether to tell him that Benét and Anderson had both recommended him for his present position but dismissed the idea at once. Instead, I bullied him until he consented to put on his single epaulette for me. As far as I was concerned it was an anticlimax. The wretched ornament had been so long in store it was permanently crumpled and the gilting turned to something suspiciously like brass. It looked as if a large bird, an eagle or a vulture, had muted from a mast on his shoulder.
“I am most impressed, Charles! I may still call you Charles? You will not mind the involuntary word ‘captain’ escaping from my lips now and then?”
“It is a dream.”
“Well—let us celebrate it ashore.”
“No. I will see the governor tomorrow. But today—”
He fell silent and I wondered if the requirement of his religion had come before him. But then I saw that he was stroking the bare wood of the side of the bunk—the way, I thought suddenly, a man or woman might stroke the side of their onetime bridal bed! He stood up, went to the bulkhead and stroked it—stood by the great stern window and rubbed the mist of his breath from the glass—
“What is it?”
He came back, sat down by me on the bunk again.
“You will not understand me, Edmund. That time after I was made a midshipman and got my hands on a sextant. Then later when the board called me before them and told me I had passed for lieutenant—and now! Captain? Yes—but I have a ship, my ship!”
“Oh, come. You will do better than this! Captain!”
“You would not understand.”
I left him at last, to take up residence in the spare bedroom which Markham had kindly loaned me. I went, with a sense I could not at first define, of disappointment. I did finally track it down to Charles’s delight with a moored and superannuated vessel!
Markham had not returned from some assignation. I thought then that my sense of greyness and disinclination for anything but sleep was from short commons and nothing to drink. I went therefore to the only inn in the vicinity which looked respectable—and felt lonely. Then I remembered the letters—paid my shot and hurried to the Residency. My letters were in a tied bundle on Markham’s desk. I sat there and opened one which I recognized by the straggling direction as from my father. In his usual ill-spelt and indeed ungrammatical hand he told me without any preamble that my godfather was dead. He had rejoiced at the fall of the Corsican Tyrant too well and died of the consequent apoplexy. My future fell in ruins round my feet.
That was the beginning of a strange time for me. I was given no work and was supposed to be “familiarizing” myself with the situation. In fact I was avoiding it and came slowly to recognize that I was missing my friends! Those friends, I now saw, were the people with whom I had passed the best part of a year and whom I knew as well if not better than I knew my own family! Oldmeadow, Brocklebank, Mrs East, Mrs Pike, Pike, Bowles, Smiles, Tommy Taylor, Prettiman, dear Mrs Prettiman—before I knew what I was doing I found myself moving in pursuit of them! But they had vanished! My friends had vanished! Charles was in the course of vanishing in his new obsession with that hulk!
The next morning I went to the Residency and tried to find out what had happened to them all. Prettiman was not in hospital, but they had taken rooms, it was thought. Oldmeadow had marched his men up river in pursuance of orders. It was not clear what had happened to the Brocklebanks—
And so on. Charles came to the Residency, epaulette and all, and was closeted with Captain Phillip for a time. He came out, burning with enthusiasm for the job of improving the buoyage system in the harbour! I walked back with him to the ship as if I had never left her, but once there found he was happily preoccupied with Mr Cumbershum in the business of ridding the ship of her guns and at the same time ensuring that the balance was kept as even as the eye could measure it. I wandered round, therefore, a revisiting ghost. I found my first cabin and my second cabin with the marks of suicide driven into the deckhead. I walked on the poop where I had dared those monstrous walls of black flint at the tail end of the tempest. My hand on the rail felt a roughness in the palm and I looked down. My hand had lain on the very place where Deverel’s sword had nigh on cut the rail through!
There was a lump in my throat as if the memory had been happy. I could not understand what was happening. I stood with Charles and Cumbershum and they spoke of whips and timber-hitches, differed in some arcane detail of ropework, until Cumbershum stumped away muttering “Different ships, different long splices”. Even then Charles seemed far away and regarding me as a speck on the horizon while he had himself his eye on a business of the utmost importance—though it was but the working of the decayed vessel alongside a sheerhulk where all her rigging but the stump of the mainmast was to be lifted out of her!
I found the Prettimans. Mr Prettiman was being fitted with a kind of harness or strapping which would enable him to walk with crutches and perhaps in time hobble on two sticks. Mrs Prettiman was already busy with papers and arrangements for meetings. She consented to give me half an hour. When I tried to describe my state she laid down her pen, put off her pince-nez and lectured me.
“You need employment, Mr Talbot. No. You cannot help here. In fact, you should not be here at all. It will do you no good up at the Residency. The voyage has been a considerable part of your whole life, sir. Do not refine upon its nature. As I told you, it was not an Odyssey. It is no type, emblem, metaphor of the human condition. It is, or rather it was, what it was. A series of events.”
“I think there has been death in my hands.”
“Stuff and nonsense. Goodbye, Mr Talbot. For your own good—do not come here again.”
That was on the eve of the King’s Birthday. I was still in a state bordering on the morbid. Mr Macquarie had not yet returned from his island; Markham and Roberts, the other two secretaries then resident, were kind but distant. The news of my godfather’s death had reached them and Captain Phillip too.
Charles had our old ship towed out to the sheerhulk and moored alongside her. As far as I could see, he never moved out of her but was visible occasionally through the telescope which stood on the veranda of the Residency, his epaulette flashing in the eternal sun.
The King’s Birthday intensified my loneliness if anything. There was a great dinner given by the deputy governor to those he thought deserv
ed it, and this included, I am told, a number of discharged convicts, some of them wealthy. It began in the late morning and continued into the dusk. Captain Phillip had had some idea of controlling the number of healths drunk but he was unsuccessful. In fact, I believe that Edmund Talbot was the soberest man in Sydney Cove! I grieved for my friends the Prettimans, not really knowing which of the two meant the more to me—I grieved anew for Miss Chumley, that bright and unattainable star in the distant north—I grieved for Charles, who wore my golden armour and was so sure of my affection that he ignored me. Indeed, the fireworks had begun and the still waters of the cove redoubled them when I left that riotous company and went to stand by myself on the veranda, where I could stare at the sea and sky until they numbed me.
A little breeze brushed a shadow across the water. The myriad vessels—merchant, fishing, whaling, company or war—turned slowly to hang all one way on a single anchor. Our old hulk and the sheerhulk and the powder barge on the other side of her turned with them. There were red and blue and yellow stars over the water and the excited cry of children from beyond the hedges of the Residency garden.
I brooded on the disaster that had befallen me. Like Summers in the early years I should now have to work my passage. I should not be able to pass on a mention of the governor to my godfather, should not be able to press in high places for Charles’s temporary promotion to be made permanent. No, indeed. It was no Odyssey, no paradigm, metaphor, analogue—it was the ridiculous sorrows of Edmund Talbot, whom life no longer spoiled as if he were its favoured child.
I went to the telescope and looked at the sheerhulk. Our—I have written our!—the foremast and mizzenmast of Charles’s command lay on the sheerhulk’s deck. All that remained standing of the mainmast was the lower portion as far as the fighting top. I found myself looking into the dark entry to the lobby and half expected to see Mr Brocklebank emerge with his so-called wife huddled next to him under the dirty coach cloak. But all was emptiness.
There was something strange about the forrard part of the vessel, something odd about the bows. The huge anchor hung motionlessly suspended above the water—fairly by the hawse, did not seamen call it?—so as to be let go at a moment’s notice, the crown so near the surface I could see a reversed anchor hanging below the real one.
What was odd?
It was as if a mist was forming round her bows, rising, so faint a mist that only a man who had been examining the whole ship for so long—there was an acrid odour in my nostrils. It was the fireworks, of course, sheaves of them now ascending above the darkling water. The land breeze was beginning and the upside-down anchor had vanished.
Charles appeared on the quarterdeck—came stumbling out of the entry to the captain’s quarters! He leapt down the ladders, ran full tilt along the deck and vanished into the fo’castle. Behind him, a column of mist rose through the hole in the deck where the foremast had been. Charles appeared on deck again. He rushed to the mainmast, worked at it, then came away with a great axe in his hands. He ran up to the fo’castle and began to hew at the ropes which held the hulls together. He raced aft through smoke which was beginning to rise now from the whole length of the ship, was on the quarterdeck striking out again! There was a gap of water—a yard, no more—between the two hulks—all along the side of the sheerhulk which had the powder barge nestling next to it! Suddenly the hole in the deck, where the foremast had been, turned red. A single flame stood up through the hole into the open air. Charles came racing back. He sprang to the belfry, beat the bell into a furious jangling. Slowly the burning ship, smoke billowing up from her everywhere, moved out under the impulsion of the breeze into the roadstead with its swarm of anchored craft. Still the bell, and again the bell! I turned the telescope on the nearest merchantman and saw men gathering in the fo’castle round the anchor cable. Beyond her a small schooner began to haul up her staysail—farther out, still another let her squaresail drop and swell on the topmast as she made a sternboard out of the path of the dreadful vessel. Charles dived into the fo’castle but came staggering out almost at once. He raced the length of the deck, dived into the lobby and disappeared. The entry to the lobby vibrated with a dim but furious light. Over the harbour, but now no higher than a rising column of smoke, the rockets banged and crackled.
Quite suddenly I understood that Charles was in deadly danger! I did not know if he could swim, but most sailors cannot. Without thinking I began to run, down through the gardens, over cobbles, through an alley and came out panting between the godowns on this side of the quay. I ran in a panic to the landing place where a gaggle of dinghies and ships’ boats lay to their painters, climbed down—saw one had oars, cast off the painter, leapt in and set myself to row. I am no oarsman and was unhandy. Nevertheless I kept on, for all that the burning vessel seemed hopelessly beyond my reach; and then it was apparent that I could catch her, for she slewed to starboard and stopped, the tide running past her as she lay, slightly canted and aground. Wherever the ports had been open the smoke poured out of her sides, and despite the smoke I could see how she glowed below decks. I ran the dinghy hard against her, close by the aftermost of Charles’s frapping—a huge cable that ran up her side and vanished onto the deck. I clambered up her tumblehome, got myself over the bulwarks and fell on the deck coughing out curses and smoke.
“Charles!”
He had gone into the lobby. I tore off my neckcloth and bound it over my mouth and nose, then dived into the smoke.
“Charles!”
One foot stepped on nothing and I fell—it was the hole where the mizzenmast had been—and I was hanging half over it. I got up and could not tell where the ladder was. I found myself holding a rail, then a door handle. It was the cabins. I felt along them, seemingly for ever. I could not remember clearly why I had got out in the middle of the night—and then thought, of course, that it was to stand the middle as usual.
“Charles! Midshipman Talbot—”
He was nowhere, it seemed. I pawed at doors and rails: and then my feet perhaps having a better memory than my head, I found myself at the entry to the waist; and after that my feet took me up the ladder to the quarterdeck where the watch was changing.
“Talbot!”
Charles was nowhere to be seen. My head cleared a little and I remembered how he had dived into the fo’castle. It was possible—I ran down the ladders.
“Talbot, you fool!”
There was a fearful explosion almost under my feet and the frapping burst, went flying in the air, and at once there were two other explosions, one after the other. I saw the deck split open from my feet right to the fo’castle itself. The whole ship opened and sent up a tower of bright flame in the midst of which what was left of the mainmast fell thunderously. A mighty tide of sparks rushed up to overtake the fire which hung above us.
“Jump, you silly bugger!”
My hair went in a burst of flame. I turned to climb the stairs but they had gone. I went to the bulwarks but they were on fire.
“The larboard side, for Christ’s sake!”
That was downhill. There was enough left of the deck round the wheel for me to cross. It did not seem to matter. But my face was hurting and my hands. I reached a stretch of bulwark where there was no fire. I looked over into cool water which even the reflections of the burning world could not heat. I let myself fall into it.
Cumbershum got me by the collar, for I could not help myself. Somehow they lifted me into the boat; and it was there that I began to feel my pain; and until they got me to the hospital I had much ado to stop myself crying out. They stripped me and bound me with lamb’s-wool and poured the sickly laudanum into my mouth.
I will not detail my sufferings. Did they pay for anything? I think not. But there came a time when my body was well enough to let me understand the situation. My godfather was dead. Charles was dead. All those people were gone from me as surely as if they had stayed and been consumed in the burning ship.
No trace of Charles was ever found. At low water
the wreck had disintegrated and displayed her bowels for all to examine who would. He was gone. A service of remembrance was held and Charles praised as a devoted servant among those who have no memorial but have vanished away as though they had never been. I was praised far more than I deserved, but I knew grief feelingly. I dreamed of him and them and the dead ship. I woke with tears on my face to endure yet another day of harsh, intolerable sunlight. It was in the driest and emptiest of interior illuminations that I saw myself at last for what I was, and what were my scanty resources. I got up, as it were, and stood erect on naked feet. The future was hard and full. Nevertheless I girded myself and walked towards it. But I firmly believed that whatever might happen to me in the future, this was the unhappiest period of my life.
(22)
Truth, being stranger than fiction, is naturally less credible. An honest biographer, if such there be, will always reach a point where he would be happier if he could tone down the crude colours of a real life into the delicate tints of romance and legend! Such was my reflection only the other day when I reread some of the bald account which I have rendered of our antarctic adventures.
I have always been embarrassed for such authors as Fielding and Smollett, to say nothing of the moderns, Miss Austen, for example, who feel that despite all the evidence from the daily life around them, a story to be veridical should have a happy ending—or rather I was so embarrassed before my own life took a turn into regions of phantasy, of “faerie”, of ridiculous happiness!
One day, still sorrowing, I was standing on the veranda of the Residency and wondering what interior power it is which keeps the majority of men from committing suicide, when a distant thump made me look up. A ship had come in through the heads, and as I saw her I jumped in good earnest, for our saluting gun answered from below the veranda with a bang and an immense cloud of white smoke. She was a warship, then. I went to our telescope and focused it on the stranger.
I believe even then something told me that a fairy story had begun! The ship was flying a signal—her number, I suppose—and other flags which might mean anything. Under her bowsprit there was a complicated glitter. I could make out a crown, a red centre surrounded by blue, and caught my breath as I saw it might well be what a dockyard would make of a crowned kingfisher, a blue bird, a halcyon, an Alcyone! I went quickly to the office and was very nearly hit by the wad from the next explosion of our answer to her salute. Daniels and Roberts were in the office and just abandoning the paper darts with which they had been conducting the affairs of the colony. Markham, coming through the other door, said it was His Majesty’s Frigate Alcyone and now we should get some news we could believe instead of rumours from drunken merchant captains. I told myself that the most I could expect was a letter from Miss Chumley to answer the many I had sent to India by any ship going that way. But Sir Henry would have news of her. I remarked that I was acquainted with her captain and would stroll down. I went before anyone had the opportunity to offer me company and waited by the telescope until the small group that had gathered there had looked their fill. Alcyone was coming in quietly with all but her tops’ls clewed up, as was natural in such a crowded roadstead. But she was a warship and so we were signalling her into the new quay.
To the Ends of the Earth Page 66