We would have been fearful for our safety had they been whole human beings. At one place, seeing we were not going to take them, they shouted at us that one word that is the most vile in the language to a sailor. “Cowards!” At another—a small fishing village between Nice and Antibes, by name Saint-Laurent-du-Var—on becoming aware of this same fact, that they were not to accompany us, they picked up rocks, shells, anything on the sand they could lay hands on, and began to throw them at our beach party. They were so feeble that most of the rocks fell pitifully short. Then they rushed us. As they came upon us we needed only to push them back, almost gently, as one would a child, and they immediately collapsed like rag dolls onto the sand. We got in the boat and started out. Some of them waded out and tried to climb into the boat and we had to push these away also with the same gentleness, to pry their fingers off the gunwales, as they fell back into the water and we headed back to the ship standing in the distance. After that incident we began to approach the beach more cautiously. And also to go armed in order if necessary to repel those who might try to board our boat. The weapons were never needed, so weakened and wasted of body were the shore people, hardly fit to attack anything.
They were the land people. We were the sea people. That now was become the great distinction. Of course, it had always been a large difference, that between these two kinds of people. But it had never been so vast a gulf as now. They, the land people, now lived where they were not wanted—the land no longer desired human beings. They were not welcome. We, the sea people, lived where what was beneath us tolerated us as it always had. So that all of those standing on the beaches now longed desperately to be where we were. And, of course, we could not take them. This itself began to do something to the men. I could see it. In differing ways. Some it hardened in a determination that we should not let one soul of them aboard lest we endanger ourselves. Some of these even expressed something like contempt for the land people: They had made their bed, let them lie in it. These resented even our giving them anything at all from our stores. Others of the crew it brought to the very limits of compassion, that we must try to do something for them. And we did. For a while we gave them food, medicine, clothing. As we began to pass by some of the clusters on the beaches, rather than stopping at each, some of the compassionate ones even tried to sneak stores ashore on little ingenious handmade floats which they cast on the incoming tide to the land people. Then such compassion, such generosity, began, looking far enough ahead, to endanger our own stores, our own survival.
Indeed it was two of my officers whom I considered as essentially among the most compassionate of human beings who came to me and insisted, in tones as aggressive as I had ever heard from them, that I put a stop to it. One was Lieutenant Girard. “Captain, we just cannot afford to give any more food away,” she said, looking at me out of some reluctant inner ruthlessness. The doc used almost identical language, speaking of our medical stores. So that I had to issue strict orders against it, post notices, captain-signed, that anyone found giving any of ship’s stores to the land people would be subject to the severest discipline. Some of the compassionate ones even wanted to take the land people aboard. “And when the ship begins to sink because of their numbers?” I asked them. “What then?” Brutally. “Or if they begin to contaminate us all so that we have what they have—what then?” Then finally I had enough of it. I said to the compassionate ones: “Very well. If you want them aboard so much, any one of you may trade places with any one of them. A human being for a human being. You pick which one when the ship stops at the next beach. Then get ready to stop ashore yourself.” It was a bluff but that put a stop to it. No, it didn’t, not quite. At the little port of Cavalière, Hurley, seaman apprentice, tried to do just that. Picked out a child who was hanging on to his sailor’s dungarees and turned to me. “Captain, take her. I’ll stay.” I just looked at him. “No, Hurley,” I said. “You will not. Get into the boat.” When he didn’t I ordered the men to seize him and place him there. They had to drag him away from the child.
It had become so bad I began actually to fear that it would destroy the crew, tear the ship apart. The shore people: their pleading, their exhortations, their begging one moment, in their utter abasement falling to their knees, humbling and prostrating themselves as before gods, with clasped hands beseeching us to take them aboard, clutching our persons in their convulsive sobbing, their violent outbursts of grief, their desperate kisses on our trouser legs, their falling tears on our shoe-tops. Some even pressed futile, pitiful, absurd gifts upon us; men pulling out wallets and emptying them of money, wadding this worthless stuff into our hands; women offering jewelry, rings, earrings, bracelets—offering themselves; casting off every restraint, sometimes pushing their children forward as if at least surely we would take these. The next moment coming at us with a gleaming ferocity, a screeching fury, literally clawing at us in their frenzy, screaming at us the most loathsome imprecations as if we were demons, monsters, directly responsible for their condition, full of every obligation to take them aboard. These were shaking experiences, taking a fearful toll on the crew; it was getting to the men, decimating them, tearing them apart in onsets of agonizing dismay. I knew I had to stop it for the salvation of ship’s company itself; if I were to save ourselves—from corruption, from sin, from disaster. So I ceased stopping at any beaches whatsoever, passing by all clusters of human beings.
By now all ship’s company had seen at least once the people on the shore, according to my intentions. We stopped going in altogether. So that at last that question which had kept recurring like a pounding and terrible metronome in our minds and which seemed to shake the ship, “What is there to be done for them?” gave back its nonappealable answer, “Nothing, nothing, nothing.” In sure finality can come a kind of solace. Sometimes we were signaled from the shore by people waving white flags that looked like bedsheets as if to suggest that they could not possibly harm us and were seeking only a parley between land and sea people. Sometimes sending out their cries for help which drifted distantly and feebly over the water as we passed by. Sometimes, waving nothing, they just stood motionless on the beach, looking to seaward. Certainly we had established that there was no habitability to be found here, anywhere on the Mediterranean littoral. Not once did any of Selmon’s readings even approach a definition of that state, and as for the sought information, everything we were able to extract from those on all these strands agreed on one thing: that behind the shorelines matters were far worse; this fact indeed being the stimulus that drove the people to the beaches, they being the able ones, unlike those they left behind, competent, if often barely, to make the journey. We passed by these pitiful souls, these specters on the shore, and continued our journey; finally, so as to free ourselves of cries and supplications to which we had no answer, I ordered a course that kept us out of sight of the land entirely, increasing our speed, the destroyer slicing cleanly through the cobalt waters of the Mediterranean. We had to move along. For another reason, our diminishing nuclear fuel. I have no idea how much of it we will need to find a home.
* * *
* * *
* * *
More and more between watches, men may be seen topside, sometimes in twos or threes, more often alone, gazing at the empty sea, staring into its immense solitude from the equal solitude of the ship moving through it. Wrapped in those two solitudes, ship and sea, which define our existence. Seemingly looking at nothing. But in reality, I know, looking, with all intention, for the appearance of another ship to break that nakedness, nothing seeming more strange than the fact we have encountered none thus far; that we should have the sea all to ourselves. Above all they appear to long to see company, other ships, manned by fellow sailors, whatever nationality making no difference at all. Simultaneously, a curious, a remarkable thing from those excursions on the beaches. One sensed, for the first time, a kind of sexual tension move powerfully through the ship. It was almost as though ship’s company, seeing only human beings no lon
ger capable of anything, could combat that pervasiveness everywhere of the darkness and the dying, of the horror, by one means only, asserting the life force which remained all-vigorous in themselves and which is the supreme gift of the carnality of men and women. A tension tangible, startling, yes, something primitive and frightening about it. A sexual strain, approaching urgency, which rose and fell, day by day, on its own barometer. Then the sighting itself seemed to dissolve it, or more accurately to put it back into its secret lair, but only with a further ominous sense one had of its certain reappearance at another time with an impulse to take a more active form.
For lo, as if to reward all our scanning, every hand, officer and bluejacket, at one time or another having become a voluntary and eager lookout: Not far S. by S.W. of Marseille, we raised our first surface vessel.
6
The French Radioman
“Thirty minutes, Captain,” Lieutenant (jg) Selmon said, facing me on the quarterdeck. He had gone over first and come back. “She’s pretty hot.”
We had raised her on the endlessly empty blue plain of the sea just as the sun was reaching down the western sky bound for evening waters. From the beginning I had ringed the ship with lookouts and it was one of these who, sighting but a speck on the far horizon, had given the word into the speaker attached to his chest, “Ship on the starboard bow.” I was on the bridge at the time and stepped out to the wing and removed the cover from Big Eyes and saw her standing white and solitary on the blue. I swung to her stern, looking for the white wake of a ship underway: she showed none at all. She stood motionless upon the sea. I stepped back into the pilot house and looked at the gyro repeater.
“She lays thirty degrees to starboard, Mr. Thurlow,” I said to the officer of the deck. “Come to course two eight five. Standard speed.”
“Course two eight five, aye, sir. Standard speed.”
As the ship heeled and made through the water I stepped back to the wing and, leaning to Big Eyes, studied her with methodical meticulousness as we approached. First up the mast where the tricolor hung limply in the languid air. From there I followed downward and forward and could make out the large script in royal blue on her bow, Bonne-fille. I swept her. About four hundred feet overall, a white ship with pretty lines, a somewhat low freeboard for her size—especially noting that—with davits for seven lifeboats on the starboard side, on which we were closing her, and presumably the same number on the port side. All that I could see snug in their cradles. I slowly swept the deck fore to aft and back again, then a third time, raking her with my eyes. Everywhere, stem to stern, she appeared shipshape, lines coiled properly, things in their places, Bristol-fashion, a smartly tended ship. Not a soul stood on her weather decks. I went back to the bow to reconfirm: Her anchor was housed. She lay still in the sea, with no sign even of drift, only because the Mediterranean itself was caught up in one of her times of consummate peacefulness. From the clean and cloud-free heavens not a breath of wind stirred the silent waters, which lay below unblemished by wave or ripple, sea and sky one almost perfectly matching pale-blue color, a departing sun casting its last dimming light over all. I stepped back into the pilot house.
“Mr. Thurlow,” I said. “I want us alongside, no closer than five hundred yards. Stem to stern. Slow speed.”
“Alongside, five hundred yards. Stern to stern. Slow speed, aye, sir.”
“And have Mr. Selmon report to the bridge.”
As the ship commenced her maneuvers I stepped into the chartroom and pulled down Lloyd’s Register from a shelf and found her: 370 feet overall, 4,000 tons, French registry, French-manned, a luxury yacht-vessel engaged in the enterprise of passenger cruises through the Creek islands. I replaced the volume, picked up the loud hailer in the pilot house, and along with Selmon went back to the bridge wing. Below us I was aware of the many hands who had come topside, lining the lifelines, to look at her in quiet solemnity across the water. As we slowly closed, together Selmon and I stood observing her intently. She stood immaculate and gleaming in her smartness, pristine, untouched. I conferred with Selmon and he approved the course I suggested, subject to his first reconnoitering.
“Four men,” I said. “With that freeboard I think you can get aboard her from the stern. Take Preston for your ladder. Meyer and Number Two boat.”
As he went below to see to it and as we came on I began to call her through the hailer in the language of her registry. “Bonne-fille! Nous sommes le vaisseau américain U.S.S. Nathan James. Bonne-fille! . . .” hailing her repeatedly, turning the hailer up to maximum volume so that my voice boomed out across the interval of sea separating us. Only the reply of silence came back across the stilled waters.
Thurlow was bringing us smartly around until we stood five hundred yards away and abruptly the ship stopped in a faultless maneuver: Man-of-war and yacht stood, our port to her starboard, sterns on line; even on except for our extra hundred feet of length. Below me I could see Number 2 boat being lowered away and our Jacob’s ladder dropped, then Selmon with four hands and Preston descending, the boat starting across, making for her stern. Then the boat idling there; Preston standing on the gunwale; Hardy climbing up the big boatswain’s mate as he would a tree until he stood on his shoulders; a quick leap; presently I saw him standing firmly aboard her. The three others climbed up Preston and stood alongside Hardy. The four of them moving smartly along the deck as the boat swung away and followed slowly along the ship’s side to where the four hands had reached midships; then doing their job of getting the short accommodation ladder over the low freeboard. Even as they did so I was astonished to see Selmon, ignoring the ladder, make a quick jump, grasp the ship’s rail, and hoist himself quite easily up and over onto her. Then my memory fetching up a line from his service record that he had been an Olympic-class gymnast. I smiled. It had been a rather fond bit of showboating. I watched him moving around the deck, taking his readings. They came back and I had Selmon’s report: Thirty minutes he would allow us. The others waited with me on the quarterdeck. “Chief Delaney. Four men, under sidearms,” I had told Sedgwick. “Also the doc.” I hesitated and added, “And Chaplain Cavendish.” I followed the others down the ladder into the boat and we made across the water for her. We came alongside and I led the way up the accommodation ladder and stood on the quarterdeck, the men around me.
“We’ll stay together,” I said. Even a quiet voice sounded loud in the hush of ship and sea. “No straying. Keep your hands off things, understood? Look sharp. Steady as she goes, men.”
* * *
It was as though the ship were a tableau in microcosm of the most familiar and ordinary habits of the human species caught and frozen in a moment of time. The entire ship oozed the luxuriance of a routine and accepted moneyed elegance. In the dining room, which we first entered, the men were in dinner clothes, the women in evening gowns which spoke of the fashionable and the expensive as matters of course. Perhaps seventy-five of these sat at tables, set in clear munificence with silver and fine china, the diners variously in the attitudes which occur during the eating of a meal. At the table nearest us on which all our gazes now rested a man and a woman were turned, leaning toward each other as though in a moment of whispered even secretive conversation, their heads almost touching. One of the woman’s hands held carelessly to her wineglass, the other touched the sleeve of her dinner companion, while the man’s hands were affixed absently to a knife and fork in the position of cutting food, their ardent eyes staring steadfastly into each other’s in an oblivion to all else. It seemed a moment of planned assignation; made one think of a later, more important rendezvous. Across from them at the round table seating eight, a man’s head was thrown back in a manner suggesting that he had uttered an interesting remark, perhaps a witticism, at which he had just laughed, from the way his teeth were bared, all other faces at the table, save for the conspiratorial couple, being turned in expectant attentiveness toward him. On the raconteur’s starched white front lay a thin layer of brownish or tannis
h substance which somehow suggested a woman’s face powder of an exceptional fineness. Behind him and to his left—he appeared rather to be presiding over this particular party—stood a side table graced by a quartet of bottles of Bordeaux, lined up like files on parade, one empty, one half-empty, the others full but uncorked. I peered and read; all were Mouton-Rothschild, all vintage 1975. The diners had already passed the point at which substantial clues as to age remained save only for the color of hair that lay across their heads, from which the flesh, obviously with an infinitely unhurried leisurelessness, had begun to fall away in bits and pieces, in grayish-black strips, sprinkling table and food, in some instances the first evidences of bone structure beginning to appear. They made four couples, evenly divided as to men and women. Three of the men had gray or white hair, one of the women; another of the women reddish hair. Across this sedate and confidently formal scene the pure Mediterranean air, entering through the many opened ports, wafted in soft murmur, touching these terminal postures in a benison of final tranquillity; bringing also with it an almost essential assuagement for its viewers the living. But for that gentle evening breeze which had sprung up we would surely have found difficulty in standing there making our silent observations; as it was, hindrance enough that some of the men had pulled out handkerchiefs to clutch over their faces. We wandered among the tables, looking, as mute as they, at these various passengers who had boarded ship to witness the mighty and ancient artifacts of the Greek islands, the amphitheaters and the shrines, the marble temples, and to sail the wine-dark seas of the Aegean of Homer. There was a strangely gracile air of composure to the scene, a quality almost sacramental, as if the diners were waiting with a certain anticipation for the next course to be served, in the meantime well able to amuse themselves with lively conversation. Assorted nationalities surely? I tended, perhaps incorrectly, to think of such cruises as largely for Americans and kept looking for evidences. There was no way remotely to tell. Nationality, race, color, all had vanished in the common shared fate which with such evenhanded dispensation obliterates the last one of such distinctions. Though a few of those of possession, accumulation, of the ascendancy of material interests in these voyagers, as yet remained: A shaft of sparkling light flared into one’s eyes which followed it to a woman wearing an immense diamond choker which had caught and reflected a last scrap of sunlight entering through a port and which now, at the particular stage she had reached, hung considerably more loosely than when it had been fitted, the same oblique rays striking as well above the glistening jewels and directly into staring lusterless eyes which did not blink. Moving among the tables, one’s gaze rested a moment on this figure, that. A youngish-seeming woman with a Louise Brooks hairstyle and with a modeling of shoulders that seemed to mandate the unashamed display of proud nakedness extending to the line of her breasts before the blue gown began, this expanse now strewn delicately with that recurring, infinitely fine dust of Roman umber which clung everywhere. From every side their eyes regarded us, enormous and vacant in sunken sockets, the fixity of their stares in no way hostile, more of anticipation at the arrival of fresh and perhaps amusing company—one half-expected to be asked to pull up a chair. A certain languor, an unresentful indifference, lay over the entire setting. As one looked, eyes moving with an inexplicable wariness over these figures, a feeling of disconcertion as from a source unknown began to come over one, the riddlelike sense of a small mystery requiring elucidation. Their huge and ardent eyes seemed to look back at one as if about to wink. It seemed the last one of them had been grinning and even laughing uproariously when the moment arrived, as though the entire room had been caught at one instant in some universal merriment which had swept through and delighted the last table and the last diner . . . Then one became aware, in a monstrous chill of revelation, of nonexistent lips, smiles now made eternal as at some huge joke played on them and as it were on the human race . . . One then ceased to look anymore directly at individual faces.
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