I contemplated this question in the abstract and in the practical. It was clear that were I to avail myself of the opportunity for vengeance it would be of little use as the crew would to their deceased captain maintain loyalty, and would of Huzoor make short work. (I here did recall the instantaneity and utter lack of hesitation with which Mohan had, in moment of crisis, offered up his life.)
No, the captain would be dead but his craft would sail on, and his malignity would itself perpetuate, across the seas and down the years.
I gazed out the glass into the sea where plankton and other forms of life swayed this way and that, as they had since the oceans’ begetting, and would, long after we and all that we have begat are long gone. And I wondered—and I have to take into account, that I was tired, and weary, and had without intervening sleep experienced shock, and near-death—why, when faced with the opportunity to destroy the craft, or at least do it major and perhaps irreparable damage, I chose, instead: to save it.
The captain as if following my thoughts did now offer me a cheroot and with it a lighter of flint and glass. “Whale oil,” he said by way of explanation. And I did that flint make spark, and when the oiled wick was aflame, did apply that flame to the tip of the cheroot.
Said the captain, “I do hope you enjoy its pleasures.”
The taste was not like the cheroots that typically I carried with me in my leather case but exotic, more equatorial.
“Are these leaves from your homeland?” I asked.
“No, and yes,” he replied. “The tobacco is not from my native country. Nor is it tobacco. It is from the weeds of the sea, though ‘weeds’ connotes the ragtag and unwilled intrusion into an orderly garden, while these sea-weeds are neither intrusive nor undesirable. After some experimentation I have ascertained that these, the flat leaves from the coastal regions near a certain isle in the Indian Ocean, make for the best smoking. It is in one sense a substitute for land-grown tobacco, but in others, it is less an imitation than a satisfaction in its own right.”
He went on. “When I said ‘no, and yes,’ I meant that these were not leaves from the land of my birth. But they are leaves from the sea, which is now my home—” He only now took for himself a sea-cheroot, lit it with the same flint-and-crystal mechanism. “—and will be my home, for the rest of my years.”
He placed his hand now upon my sleeve, looked at me with an intensity of gaze that did not allow me to look away.
“Those years might have come to end this morning, were it not for your instinctive courage. And though the reward may not be in any way commensurate with the deed, I wanted to offer up the pleasures of my table, if I might, and to join you in the confraternity of smoke.”
“Much obliged,” I heard myself to say.
And even as my mouth those genial words did pronounce, my mind in uppermost were occupied with thoughts not genial in the extreme. Viz., how did I come to be held captive beneath the waves? And to dine with this dusky murderer? We were smoking cheroots, this man and I—how had we come so far from home, that we had lost not only sense of time, and place, of long. and lat., but also that the moral compass was so skewed, as if the iron will of the man across the table had attracted, misaligned the floating needle.
While I inhaled the thoughts danced in my head even as the smoke danced without. The three men inside me linked arms and danced a gavotte, but ‘twas a gavotte of struggle for which but one would emerge victor: The Engineer, Father of Paddington, blessed with the extraordinary ability to all problems solve; the captive, the Prisoner, Huzoor, who strained against his shackles and spent each waking hour in the contemplation of escape if not revenge; and the remaining member of this triumvirate whom we shall, with simplicity and compassion, call Isambard. Isambard, the babe in his mother’s arms; Isambard, the schoolboy at the prow of the île du Palais; Isambard, who in the berth of family and home did find harbor. Which one of these three men pulled the lever as I spoke I do not know, and may never.
“There is an imbalance, Captain, I wish to address. Let me pose it in its simplest terms. The Great Eastern was over a span of years imagined, designed, constructed by myself. A ship of ambition and accomplishment. That ship you did destroy, or did attempt to destroy. In turning that stopcock you knew, indeed, hoped, that there would be conflagration and loss of life and limb—yet you did it regardless. One might even say that for you the loss of life was not incidental, but rather the objective and aspiration.
“Now contrast your behavior—if behavior we can even term it—with that of mine own, with respect to this vessel. Where mine was on course, you sought and destroyed; where yours was endangered, I did what I could to steer her from harm’s way. Our comportments were as antipodes.
“I am not trying to paint myself a saint, for I am nothing of the sort. But it is not unfair to state that you are a sinner. ‘Gainst God, and ‘gainst your fellow man, for whom you seem to have no care, or compassion, save the ways in which he can further your ends. It is almost as if you held yourself to be another species above that of humanity, and that to you the scurrying of humans on the planet mean no more than the scurrying of ants round the rotting stump. And this human: do you intend to keep him captive for the remainder of his allotted days? Or merely until your captive has outlived his usefulness, then to be dispatched to a watery grave?”
There were a pause, quite long in duration, during which could be heard the whine of the Neptune‘s turbine, the coming-going of the crew, the occasional thud, an impact of something ‘gainst hull generating sonics propagating through air and through iron, yet at differing speeds, and by distinct routes, direct and circuitous: THRUMbum bum bum, THRUMbum bum, damping out slow over the course of several seconds.
“Are you quite done,” asked the captain finally, with what might be perceived as a trace of impatience. He gazed at me—stared, really—as if he were taking my measure. And then commenced to speak. I was of course exhausted, and spent, from the events of the day; and as I write this now I know that I am not transcribing verbatim. But I set this down now, prior to what I hope will be a long and pacific night in the arms of Morpheus, as I do not wish (have stated before?) the pungency & tang of immediate memory to be unsharped. Thus here is what the captain he said as best I can set it down—and if his words do not seem directly responsive to my questions, this is neither an act of elision nor an error of transcription.
“As you may have previously learned, or perhaps surmised,” he said, “I did not achieve command but was born to it. I was a prince, in Bundelkhand, in the mountains of what you call India. By English map it is one of the Princely States, yet to us it is simply our land. Bundelkhand. Of which I was, from the moment of first cry, Prince. As was my father before me, and his before him, as was, as was, going back further than any European or Englishman can count or imagine.
“I state this flat: you do not know what it is like to be the prince of Bundelkhand. You do not know. Perhaps the best analogy might be, ‘tis like being the captain of a ship, but the ship be land, near-infinite land, all that the eye can survey. And as puissant as the powers of a ship’s captain might be, that of the Prince are ten- or hundred-fold. My wants, even as a child, were unquestioned. Were I to make to sit a chair would appear beneath me before my rump hit bottom. No one entered a chamber in which I was present without bowing, low, so that forehead touched earth.
“Nor was I raised by my parents as, I suspect, you were by yours, and to good effect, given the training and connaissance in engineering which your father to you did bequeath. No, I was raised by a succession of amahs, such that I had neither companions nor rivals nor figures of masculine authority over me. I was the prince of Bundelkhand. And Bundelkhand was the world.
“My word was law from the instant I could utter. Even as a babe in arms the lives of others were dependent upon my wishes. And that power only increased as I came of age. So you speak of the fire-men aboard the Great Eastern who perished, with a quarter-turn of my wrist. Yes, their lives are on
my account. But the lives of thousands, nay tens of thousands, have been on my account since before I could stand on two legs. I am not saying this as self-absolution, for the totality of my actions in this lifetime will certainly be taken into account when the deities consign me to the next. But I am saying, M. Brunel, that you cannot imagine—” And here his wide-set eyes bore into me, full, with an unblinking intensity. “—you cannot imagine.”
It was impossible to interject.
“And though I reject the notion of the double-entry ledger,” he went on, “of that-which-is-done-to-me-I-shall-now-to-others-in-same-measure-do, I want to lay out for you, not as justification, but let us say as context, my history with the English race.” Here he fired up another cheroot (taking care to offer one across the table which, owing to my habits, I accepted, without fully thinking of the moral obligation thus incurred) and continued his tale.
“It was a given that the young prince of Bundelkhand should be given the finest raiment, the swiftest horse, the most glistening of jewels; and among those jewels was, of course, education. For it was not sufficient for me to be powerful. I was shipped o’erseas to become knowledgeable, with the understanding that I would upon completion of my formal education return to Bundelkhand, there to become wise.
“I was thus dispatched to Trinity College, Cambridge. It consists, and I am sure you know this, of a great court, round which is a wall. As if the learning and tradition contained within be subject to siege, or might want from the confines of Cambridge to escape.
“I was not like the others: this was a given. I did not expect to be liked. Yet there is a tradition in certain colleges—as Trinity, as Oxford’s Magdalen—that encompasses those such as myself. Which is to say, princely figures from what they call the subcontinent—and why ‘sub,’ as it is larger than the British Isles by a factor of ten? We have come to these places for hundreds of years so I was neither the first nor the last to cross the gate, enter the court, porters carrying my bags behind and a turban wrapp’d round the head. Even as I gazed up at the intaglio’d device, carved into that stone wall—Trinity, meaning, of course, the father, son, and ghost of what to me is a Johnny Newcome faith—I expected to within those walls find, if not compassion, at least acceptance. I already knew, as a matter of cultural difference, that there would be some difficulty among the Cantabrigians in matters of ritual and language. Would they, for instance, grasp the properispomena of my native tongue?
“What I found, though, was different in kind as well as degree. It was as night turned day—or, more accurately, day turned night. Whereas in Bundelkhand I was unquestioned master, here I was regarded as some dark-hued bottom boy, beneath the baby lords, and the viscount’s son, beneath, in their eyes, the porters who swept their rooms, the laundresses who each week scrubbed from bedsheets the signs of their decadence. In their book the highest prince from Bundelkhand ranked beneath the lowliest Englishman. It was as if, by dint of birth, I had already a crime committed before my first sigh.
“My chamber-fellow, a corpulent badger named Ffoulkes, at first would not meet my gaze. And when it became clear that I was both more intelligent, and had more capacity for learning, than Ffoulkes and his ale-swilling pals— His diffidence turned to enmity active. I will not enumerate for you the thousands of slights, all of similar intent: to let the dusky creature know that he was not, and never would become, fit to polish their boots.
“Both as a representative, however unwilling, of my caste, and because it was how I was by Devi and my amahs raised, I was slow to anger. Nay: I did not allow myself that emotion to feel. I did not retort, reply, respond. When they re-made my bed so that the one sheet were doubled and there be no room for my feet I simply slept curled. When they jostled my plate in the common room that evening I ate not. There were incidents of this nature every day, and every day I kept my silence. And with it, my honor.
“Now I had brought with me from Bundelkhand few possessions. There were some treasured books, of course. And some personal correspondence, of which I will not speak here. I allowed myself but one extravagance. It was an object. An object small yet perfectly wrought. Do you know, M. Brunel, what is: an armillary sphere?”
“Indeed.”
“Then I need not lay out for you the intricacies of brass and wood that go into the crafting of such an object. In my case, the wood was shesam, and the brass forged by the masters of New Delhi. The sun at the center of the sphere was of yellow ceramic that seemed somehow to glow from within. The planets were extraordinarily detailed. Our earth, for example, was depicted with the aid of jewels of varying hues—emeralds, rubies, but also tourmaline, and beryl—the oceans deep celeste, the mountain peaks nacarat. And of course with diamonds, inset, representing the significant cities of the world. The mechanism of the sphere was so well-wrought as to be nearly without friction, so that once the handle were turned, the planets would commence their circling of the earth and not stop for the longest while, or until a human tired of the cosmos and intervened by hand.
“This armillary sphere was given to me by the wisest man I have ever known. It is nothing short of a blessing that you had the occasion to know him. Mr. Singh was my tutor, but he was more. Though it makes no logical sense for a prince to say this of a subject: he was my master. It was from him that I learned the calculus; from him that I learned the interactions of elements which constitute the chemistry; it was Mr. Singh who inhabited the mechanical Turk and was responsible for all of the Turk’s victories. It was from Mr. Singh that I learned language, or, to be more accurate, languages plural; but more. It was from him that I learned that the world was not sad: the world was large. A notion of which I have tried to keep hold since his wrenching and untimely death.
“I can only imagine the cost, on a tutor’s wages, of this object. Was it something for which he set aside, each month, the larger moiety of his salary, that he and his own did without? Was it, perhaps, his sole inheritance, passed on now, not to his son, but to me? Can one even fathom the degree of sacrifice, the depth of generosity behind this gift? There is no parallel in my life nor, I suspect, in yours. And in giving it to me on the eve of my departure, he was teaching me a final lesson. A lesson in dignity, a lesson in heart. And, of course, a lesson about our planetary system, with the sun at its center: not the planet on which we reside, as many for centuries had assumed, and some still do.
“I do not, M. Brunel, place great store in objects. In books, yes, as you can see. In charts. But I am not a sentimental man, and the rigors of living in these confines teach a certain economy. I have retained nothing of childhood. Yet this mechanical representation of our planetary system meant the world to me. It was something that could be held in two hands and yet it was the universe.”
He stared out through the large glass, then returned his wide-set and relentless gaze to his Huzoor. “One afternoon, toward the beginning of winter, I left my chambers to take advantage of decanal hours. As I left it was raining. When I returned the sun was low in the sky, rays slanting and painful as they are when we near the winter solstice. The rain had turned to sleet. I tell you this to set the scene, to let you know the weather exterior that was soon was to become a winter in my soul. Because when I returned to my room, there was my bed, my books; there was the squat and porcine Ffoulkes. But what was not there: the sphere, the armillary sphere, the axis round which my inner life revolved.
“I immediately demanded of Ffoulkes, ‘Where is it?’ And he said, ‘Where is what?’ I realized that this was less a response than a taunt, and his mirth was ill-concealed ‘neath his placid dropsied face. And then, when he felt he’d be able to speak without laughter, he said, ‘And I believe that in these precincts, Prince, it is I who ask the questions and you who supply the answers.’
“I realized that he was not malign—that he had not hid the sphere solely with injurious intent. Rather he was righting a balance. He had been forced to share a chamber with someone not of his class, someone whom nonetheless was in the larg
er sense less his inferior than his better. And so his resentment festered until his oedematous brain devised a scheme: he would take from me all that mattered, that we by that act would somehow be more equalized.
“I realized that further interrogation would yield naught. Thus I returned to my customary demeanor: ‘I seem,’ I told him, ‘to have misplaced my armillary sphere. If your eye should fall upon it, would you be so kind as to let me know?’ He did not know if I was mocking him or admitting defeat. His reply, in a voice I can only describe as redolent with Ffoulkesian condescension, was but this: ‘Of course, Your Highness.’
“I made three vows in one instant. The first, that I would recover the sphere, no matter the cost to my standing, my studies, or to the détente which between myself and my fellow students had heretofore prevailed. The second, that Ffoulkes would die well before his allotted time. The third—and this came of the realization that the problem was not Ffoulkes, but the larger group of Ffoulkeses, which is to say, England—that I would direct my education to the end of protecting myself, and all of Bundelkhand, from their depredations.
“None of these was an easy task.
“The first took some doing. I did not report the loss to the College or to the Cambridge constabulary, knowing that this would be futile and would only expose me to a more protracted ridicule. But each night after Ffoulkes was asleep—and I can still hear his loathsome and indolent snore—I quit my chambers and, attired in black, padded silently to the Great Court. I knew, from tales injudiciously revealed by Ffoulkes and his ilk in ale-induced candor that they often used certain spots in that Court as carnary grounds for that which they sought to conceal. With a metal probe I poked at the dirt looking for hollow or for full stop. I was methodical, devoting each night to a different sector, as if blacking out boxes on a quadrant-ruled sheet. My course of action subtended sixty-four nights. And it was on the fifty-second of these that I found, not what I was looking for, but a fragment.
The Great Eastern Page 14