I looked dubiously at the poor crazy chap, in no mood to pry into his daft secrets. “You don’t need to take too seriously what I said last night,” he explained with a sheepish smile. “I mean about hating you. I have to do that sort of thing. Self-protection, you know. I can’t have people nosing about my ship.” He sank his voice lower still. “There’s enough evidence aboard the Jezebel to blow the throne of Peter sky-high.”
“I want to have a row,” I said. “I’m a bit cold after my swim.”
“My dear Mr. Essex,” he protested, speaking quite sanely. “I know the duties of hospitality. My galley fire is lighted. My ship is warm. You shall have a cup of tea. And then—” with his lively eye glinting again, “you shall see the evidence.”
He turned the nose of his dinghy towards the Jezebel, and I followed.
I was surprised at the order aboard. The long deck was spotless. We descended a stairway, and Judas explained how he had converted the below-decks of the ship into a home. A bulkhead cut off the rear portion which he used as a bedroom. Another cut off a part of the bows in which a useful kitchen was installed. Between these two, running from side to side of the ship and most of her length, was a room of splendid proportions. A fireplace was let into the side that faced the river. A window on either hand was cut through the ship’s timbers, and a settle stood at right angles to each of these windows. On whichever you sat, there was the window to light you, a fire at your feet, a table before the fire, and a lamp hanging above it. On the opposite side of the room, the space between the ship’s ribs had been fitted with bookshelves. There were hundreds of books, many of them abstruse theological works, some in English, some in German. Captain Judas pattered behind me on his light rubbered feet as I read the titles. “Nonsense, all nonsense,” he muttered. “They’ve never got to the root of the matter. They haven’t got the evidence. They’ll all be blown sky-high.”
I accompanied the captain into the galley where he made tea with an old-maidish neatness. He put the cups and teapot, with some biscuits, on to a tray, and then we went and sat at the windows of his big room. I imagined it would be a snug spot in the winter, when the fire and lamp were lit and the wind was blustering up the river. But I should have preferred something other than the picture over the fireplace: a large reproduction of a painting of the crucifixion.
The windows were open on to the morning. The sun was getting up, drawing the mist off the river. Great scarves of it hung across the face of the woods opposite, like autumn cobwebs caught on brambles. I could see the façade of Heronwater through the trees, and Sam Sawle sauntering along the quay, taking the sense of the morning. Judas had chosen a lovely spot.
He was watching me intently. His one living eye was like the gimlet I had dreamed of. His small fingers were drumming on the table. Suddenly he said: “You are not a Roman Catholic, are you?”
I shook my head, and he looked relieved. With his arms folded before him on the table, he leaned across to me and whispered: “The Pope is on my trail. They’ve tried persuasion. They’ve offered to make me a Papal count. I’ve refused all that—turned it down flat. So now they’ll try force or fraud. There are seven members of the Dominican Order who have been entrusted with this as a life’s work—this business of laying hands on the evidence and destroying it. That was why I had to leave the Hebrides.”
He poured me out another cup of tea. “You live a trying life,” I said to humour him.
“You don’t know the half of it,” he answered. “The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Scottish Moderator, the President of the Wesleyan Conference, the head of the Baptists, whatever he calls himself—they’re all one cabal when it comes to this question. But here I am. They don’t know I’m here. And now I’ll show you.”
Long strips of cocoanut matting, laid side by side, covered the floor. Captain Judas rolled up the middle one and revealed a trap-door with a ringbolt. He pulled up the door and swung a lantern down into the cavity which ran right under the ship. “The bilge,” he explained, “but as dry as a desert. Not a rat aboard this ship, Mr. Essex, not a bug, not a cockroach.”
He was kneeling on the edge of the hole, and I looked over his shoulder into the faintly illuminated darkness. He took a rope with a hook on the end and lowered it towards a leather chest with an arched top. The hook caught in a ring, and, putting down his lantern, Captain Judas hauled with both his small white hands. Soon the chest lay at our feet. He shut the trap, rolled back the matting, and looked at me with cunning. He tapped the lid of the chest fondly. “Dynamite!” he said. “Enough here to blow the Pope off his throne. Descendant of Peter! This does for Master Peter!”
He locked all three of the doors: the one that gave upon the stairway, the bedroom door and the galley door. He shut the windows and drew the curtains across them. He hauled on a string that was fastened round his neck. There was a key at the end of it. He put the key into the lock and then paused dramatically, his glittering eye fastened upon my countenance. “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” He pulled open the chest. It was stuffed with sheaves of paper, neatly tied with red tape, and Captain Judas plunged in his hands and tossed them out gaily on to the table.
“Take hold of them. They won’t explode—yet,” he chuckled.
I took up some of the bundles and read the superscriptions, written in a small beautiful hand. “Fishermen throughout the Ages—unreliability of—with special reference to recent fraudulent bankruptcy of Grimsby firm.” “The Night in Question. (a) Where was Peter? (b) Where was Andrew the son of Zebedee?” “Judas, the Disciples’ Cashier. Honesty of his Book-keeping Methods.” “Suicide of Judas. Effect of Unjust Accusation upon Sensitive Soul. c.f. numerous cases throughout History.”
There were other superscriptions that were just crazy: “The Cross, the Crux, the Crisis and Creation.” “The Origin of Origen.” “Pax vobiscum, pax Romanorum, packs of cards, packs of hounds.” “Sketch of a method of approach to the Whole Matter with short cuts via (a) Bedlam (b) the House of Commons (c) the Curator of the National Gallery (vide Crucifixion pictures passim).”
There were scores of those dossiers. The trunk had been stuffed with them. I let them slide through my fingers, no longer reading the titles, somehow ashamed at having allowed myself to be drawn to this spectacle of a mind’s disintegration. I should never now be able to look across the river and see the light burning on the Jebezel without picturing the old boy sitting thus behind his locked doors, gloating over these treasures of hallucination, or, bowed beneath his lamp, adding patiently to this babel of imbecility. And now to get out, as gracefully as I could.
I stood up. “A remarkable collection,” I said. “This must represent years of research and writing.”
“Ten years,” he replied. “The ten happiest years of my life. Not a moment wasted. All tending to a point—and that point nearly reached. Whoosh! Bang! Wallop!”
He flung abroad his arms to indicate the suddenly disrupted pretensions of the Holy See, and smiled beatifically.
“Well,” I said, “I must thank you, Captain Judas, for taking me into your confidence. You may rely on me.”
He bowed with grave formality.
“And now I must be going. My people will wonder what’s become of me.”
He accompanied me to the door giving on the stairway and unlocked it. “Forgive me if I don’t see you off,” he murmured. I heard the lock click behind me, and could picture him refilling the chest, stowing it safely out of reach of the seven Papal desperadoes. I saw his curtain drawn an inch aside as I rowed away from the ship, and I knew he was watching me, wondering perhaps whether I looked the sort of man who would blow the gaff on his cosmic ambitions.
16
Now that I had broken the ice with Captain Judas, we knew no more of the mock ferocity with which he had greeted our arrival. Throughout that holiday the children were to be seen swarming like monkeys up the Jezebel’s rope ladder and making the ship their own. To live in a house how
ever near the water is not the same thing as to live in a ship whose timbers are laved by the tide, and once old Judas had given the children a footing, they were soon all over him.
He had a telescope on a tripod fixed to his deck, and though the twistings of the river confined the view to our own reach, you would see Oliver, Rory or Eileen sitting at all times of the day on the chair which allowed the telescope to be used without fatigue.
It was Oliver who discovered that the old man could be coaxed beyond mere acquiescence. He invented the great game of the careened ship. The Jezebel had been sailing the seas for month after month. Judas, as Captain Morgan, had had a high old time, seizing treasure, causing captured crews to walk the plank, showing a clean pair of heels when a King’s ship hove in sight. And now she had become so foul that she dragged through the water like an old dish-clout, and sailing her to a quiet beach, Morgan had run her ashore for a clean-up and overhaul.
I had not known how deeply Oliver had been reading in the annals of buccaneering, but he was all excited as he instructed us in our parts. He was a Greek hailing from Tiger Bay, Morgan’s right-hand man, and Eileen must be an English heiress who has been spared, on some occasion when the decks ran blood, because she was worth a ransom. She had fallen in love with the handsome Greek, and was now ready to follow him to the ends of the earth.
“Why do you always have to be someone handsome?” Maeve asked sullenly.
Usually we left the games on the Jezebel to the three younger children, but that afternoon we were all there except Nellie. Captain Judas had invited us to tea. Nellie had not come because, she said, she had dinner for a regiment to look after. As a fact, it was because she distrusted anything so unusual as Captain Judas.
The tea had been a spartan affair, but Judas presided in his great room with considerable dignity. He lapsed occasionally. He regarded me now as a fellow conspirator, pledged to the ruin of Rome’s pretensions, and mystified the other guests by occasionally tipping me a wink with his sound, fiery eye, pointing darkly in the direction of the bilge, and forming with his lips the words: “Whoosh! Bang! Wallop!”
And now tea was over, the girls had washed up, and we were all sitting on the deck above, listening to Oliver extemporising his game.
“Why do you always have to be someone handsome?” Maeve demanded.
Oliver flushed. “I can’t help it. I am handsome,” he declared.
Captain Judas clapped him on the back. “Of course he’s handsome,” he shouted. “The handsomest young cock that ever strutted on a deck.” He caught hold of the boy and stood him between his knees. He gazed at him long and earnestly, ruffled the close golden curls of his head, and seemed to drink in an extraordinary pleasure from the steady glance that Oliver directed upon him from his blue, candid eyes. “Don’t you be surprised,” he said at length, “if you see this young man walking home some day. Yes—walking. Not rowing. Walking home from here across the water.”
The children all looked baffled by this queer remark. Sheila, Dermot and I were embarrassed. We didn’t know which way to turn. We felt that Judas was going too far; but he spoke with such simplicity and matter-of-factness that we could do nothing about it. In a moment he ended the difficult situation himself. He pushed Oliver from him gently, and said: “Well, get on with your game. Play while you can. They’ll get you at last. So play now, play.”
And we played. Morgan, his Greek, and the heiress remained aboard the Jebezel, with Sheila as an Indian girl of great beauty whom Morgan had picked up in the sack of a city. The praam, with Dermot and Rory aboard, the dingy with Maeve and me, were a couple of frigates that had come into the bay. It was our business to board the Jebezel and clap Morgan into irons.
It was a glorious engagement. From opposite points of the river the frigates converged upon the ship. Dermot was there first, and as he set foot upon the rope ladder old Judas leaned over the rail and yelled for a party to repel boarders. Rory tied the praam to the hulk’s side and swarmed up the ladder behind Dermot. Blows from rolled-up newspapers rained on Dermot’s head and shoulders, and above the shrill falsetto of Judas’s shout rose a kind of Red Indian yodel which the Greek from Tiger Bay thought appropriate to the occasion.
While the battle at that point seemed likely to end in stalemate, Dermot firmly repulsed and Rory unable to get any higher on the ladder, I rowed the dinghy to the bows of the Jebezel. Keeping close in to the timbers, I was hidden from observation by the bulge of the ship’s side. Once at the bows we were out of sight. We had a spare painter in the dinghy and there wasn’t much difficulty in throwing an end over the figurehead that now loomed above us: the head and torso of a repellent woman with bulging eyes and flowing hair. When the two ends of the rope were fastened together, we had a practicable means of entry to the Jezebel. I swarmed up first, and found it easy to proceed from Jezebel’s back to a point whence I could jump aboard. I raised a yell which caused the defenders to turn for a moment from their belabouring of Dermot. The brief respite enabled him to clamber through the open port in the bulwarks and drive the enemy towards me. A moment later he was joined by Rory and I by Maeve. We herded the whole crew towards the stairway and drove them safely below decks.
Oliver was dancing with excitement. “How did you get aboard?” he kept on asking; and Maeve twitted him: “That was one up on the handsome Greek! Brains are better than beauty.”
“But how did you do it?” he persisted, so I took him up on deck and showed him.
“I’d like to try that,” he said.
I climbed out first on to the figurehead and returned to the dinghy hand over hand down the rope. Oliver followed, unknotted the rope, and pulled it down. Then with the gravest concentration he did the whole thing for himself: swung the rope’s end over the figurehead, knotted the ends, and swarmed aboard. He went through the process three times.
“You seem very keen on this,” I said. “What’s the idea? Are you thinking of burgling the captain some night?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t look at me. He coiled the rope swiftly but neatly. “That’ll do,” he said. “Let me row you back.” And all the way across the river he didn’t look at me or speak.
*
It was very hot that day. After dinner we sat on deck-chairs on the lawn. You could just see the water darkling below, and the black curtain of trees hung before the opposite bank. Two orange squares bloomed silently down there on the darkness. Captain Judas, his boyish day-time relaxations behind him, would be toiling under lock and key upon his fantastic documents.
Nobody spoke. Farther along the terrace Dermot’s cigar made a red spot in the dusk. Nellie and Sheila, doing nothing, leaning back, were between him and me. The children were gone to bed. We didn’t think of Maeve any more as one of the children. She came out from the house now, soft-footed across the lawn, and leant for a moment against the back of my chair. I could feel the fragrance of her breath on my head, and I put up my hand and stroked her hair.
“It’s beautiful,” she said in a voice that was part of the quiet loveliness of the moment. She took my hand and held it between both of hers. “Take me on the water,” she said.
I got up, and we slipped together into the darkness of the trees. The rough, downward twisting path was invisible. She had put on a thick white coat and seemed to glimmer like a little ghost at my side. She put both her hands through my arm and linked her fingers. Her whole weight came on to me once or twice when she half-stumbled. The wood was full of the damp secret smell of ferns and of maturing things.
“I don’t like the games—the sort we played this afternoon. I’m growing up.”
“You’re a sweet child,” I said.
She protested eagerly. “No, no. I’m fourteen, and there’s so much to do.”
She clung to me rather desperately over a rocky bit of the path. “It’s because no one cares,” she said. “That’s what makes me anxious. Nobody’s starting me on anything. You said you’d speak to father about my being an actress. Have you do
ne it, Uncle Bill?”
We came with a little rush out from the woods on to the flatness of the quay. It was lighter there. Her pale oval face, in which at night the eyes seemed quite black, looked appealingly into mine.
“Why, bless my soul, you tragic young woman,” I said, “at your age I was chopping wood for a country parson, not bothering about a career. Don’t fret, my dear. I’ll speak to your father when the right moment comes.”
Sam Sawle was sitting on the coping of the quay, smoking a pipe. He got up and came towards us. “You going out, Mr. Essex?” He spoke very quietly. It was the sort of night when a voice raised above a whisper sounded offensive. I nodded.
“What’ll you take?”
“What about the motor-boat? We could run down to the Carrick Roads.”
Maeve shook her head. “No. Not tonight. I hate the sound of a motor-boat at night up here where the river is quiet. Let’s take the dinghy. I’ll row if you get tired.”
Sawle pulled the dinghy to the steps. “There’ll be plenty of water for a long time,” he said. “The tide’s hardly full.”
He fetched some cushions from his shack and arranged them behind Maeve as she sat in the stern. He pushed the boat out. The rim of the full moon, yellow and enormous, was just edging up above the woods and seeming to dim the radiance of Captain Judas’s windows. A sprinkle of silver fell across the river in a trembling cord between him and us.
I pulled with leisurely strokes, listening to the musical fall of drops from the blades, the soft suck and gurgle as the boat nosed into the water.
“That’s better,” said Maeve. “That’s the sort of sound to hear at night. I don’t mind the old Maeve’s roaring when the sun’s shining, but I hate it under the moon.”
She trailed her fingers through the water and withdrew them quickly. “Cold! Cold!” she said, and tucked her hand inside her coat. She shivered slightly, and I asked whether I should return for a rug. “No, no,” she said. “It’s lovely. Don’t talk.”
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