I shook my head and he fell silent. I thought for a while.
“You are going the wrong way about it. An approach to the captain must be your last resort. Personally, I do not agree that we should alter course. Children are liable to rashes. Why—my young brothers—we ought to endure—carry on across this wilderness until we reach our end. But you have touched my, my . . . I will try to persuade the first lieutenant that he should carry your wishes to the captain. If he will not, or if the captain refuses that first approach, then yes, I myself will go to him.” At last I took my head out of my hands and blinked round at them.
“We must go with great care. The position of a passenger in a ship of war—the captain’s power may well be absolute. Who would have thought when I said he was our moghool that this occasion was waiting round the corner? I will make your views known to the first lieutenant. He may even be on deck—and now—”
I stood up and bowed. I reeled to the door and took a clumsy run through the streaming lobby, got the door of the hutch open and collapsed on my bunk. When Wheeler entered, he having, I suspected, waited outside the saloon door and then my door—and was only happy it seemed within arm’s length of me as if he were harnessed for my convenience—Wheeler helped me into my oilskins. I muttered a queasy dismissal and he replied that he would remain to clean the cabin and “do what he could” with the bunk. I gave little thought to his curious assiduity but slumped for a while in my canvas chair to get myself together. At last I hauled myself to my feet and opened the door as the sheet of water in the lobby splashed over the combing which is supposed to keep it out of our hutches. I went forward into the daylight of the waist, holding on where possible. There was wind on the left, a grey sky above, grey sea, dirty white foam, a wet ship drab as the skirts of a beggar woman. The water in the lobby was as nothing to the positive tides of it which made an intermittent hazard of the open deck. There were safety lines rigged everywhere. These daunted by implication rather than invited and seemed at best no more than ropes tying together the wet, belaboured box that was our ship. I saw a seaman working his way along a rope to the fo’castle. He held on with one hand while a wave washed over him as high as his waist and a torrent of foaming water fell on his head and shoulders from the fo’castle itself. I waited for a pause in our motion, then made a staggering run to the windward side of the ship and hung on to a belaying pin under the ship’s rail. I opened my mouth wide and took great gulps of the wet air which at least served to quell the unease of my stomach. I felt as strong an irritation at this latest demand on my tact and ingenuity as ever I had done when asked by Charles Summers to do what I could for the wretched Colley! And success, a turning aside from our present course to redirect the ship towards the coast of South America, would do no more for me myself than delay my arrival in the Antipodes! It would put beyond all possibility those faint hopes—a delay at the Cape of Good Hope—even their ship delayed and rescued by us as she wallowed mastless on our course—of seeing Miss Chumley once more before the remotest of remote futures!
I cursed aloud. As if to torment me further our ship, struck by a seventh wave, bucked like a frightened horse and seemed to remain without forward movement, for all her straining sails. I stared round me trying to understand what I could of our situation and I was rendered very thoughtful by what I saw.
The last time I had watched the conduct of our ship in such weather had been in the English Channel. There, as if she were aware that she was under the eye of Old England, for all the boisterousness of the sea and sky she had seemed to take part and revel in the friendly contest. She did so no more. Like a horse which knows itself tired and moving further and further away from its stable, she jibbed and went slow. She was sullen and needed a touch of the whip—better still, a whiff of the manger! Although her bows were pointed up towards the wind she had next to no forward movement. The waves passed under her—or sometimes, it seemed, over her—but she did hardly more than heave up, then slide down into the same trough in the same place. I dared to haul myself upright and peer over the rail by me. I was rewarded by the sight of what looked like green hair swirling among foam as if those fabled and inimical sisters swam about us holding us back and pulling us down! Before I had recovered from the cold thrill of the sight the whole sea with its hair and foam rose at me, over me, drowned me, pulled at me with appalling strength so that my two hands clutched round the iron barrel of the belaying pin were no more than just enough to prevent me from being washed clean out of the ship and lost for ever.
Someone was shouting in my ear.
“This is no place for passengers! Get back while you may! Come now—make a run for it!”
It was a voice with extraordinary authority. I did run, splashing through a few inches of pouring water as the deck came momentarily up to the horizontal, then continued to swing over in the other direction. My feet slipped and I should have performed a glissade which would have smashed my bones in the opposite scuppers had not the man running beside me grabbed my arm and fairly lifted me onto the stairs leading up to the afterdecks. Here he pushed me against the rail, made sure I was attached, then stood back.
“You were nearly gone, sir. Mr Talbot, I believe.”
He pulled off his sou’wester and shook out far more golden locks than a man ought to have. He was smaller than I. But then—so are most people! He smiled up at me with great cheerfulness as a volley of spray shot past us. I had an instant impression of blue eyes, pink cheeks and ruddy lips which seemed by their delicacy to have evaded the wildness of the weather and even the touch of the tropic sun.
“Thank you for your assistance. To tell the truth my strength has not yet come back. But you have the advantage of me.”
“Benét, sir. Lieutenant Benét with one ‘n’, and an acute accent on the second ‘e’.”
I was lifting my free hand to take his politely but as I did so he raised his head and his face changed to one of anger. His eyes seemed to sparkle as he stared forward and up into the rigging.
“Francis, you careless bugger! If I see you slip out of the strop to save yourself trouble I’ll have you at the grating!” He turned back to me. “They are worse than children, Mr Talbot, and will kill themselves heedlessly where you might well have done it through ignorance. You must allow me to conduct you to your cabin—no, no, Mr Talbot, it is no trouble—”
“But you are employed about the ship!”
For answer he glanced up at the rigging again.
“Mr Willis! Although you are mastheaded you may consider yourself in charge of the work there and the men employed about it. Contrive not to lose the mainmast. Now, Mr Talbot—run for it!”
To my surprise I found myself obeying this young man with an alacrity which even Captain Anderson could not have produced in me. What is more I jumped into the lobby with a sense of what a jest it all was!
“That will be all, Wheeler. Mr Benét, pray be seated.”
“You are a sick man, sir. I am not sick in body, though perhaps in mind it is a different story. Grief fills my sails.
Fairest woman
In form and feature really most uncommon.
I worked that out and more of the like during the last dog. Oh, I remember now. It went
Fairest creature lovelier than a woman
In form and feature really most uncommon.
The lines were wrenched from me. They came all in one piece.
Nor would I lay
A feather of regret upon thy soul.
The feather is particularly felicitous, is it not?”
A painful suspicion grabbed at my heart.
“You are from Alcyone!”
“Where else in this waste of water?
A long, long exile now must be my lot.
Do you approve the alliteration? We shall meet again of course. But I am summoned to a conference with the first lieutenant in the hold.”
He withdrew briskly. I shouted for Wheeler who as usual was near my hutch. He got me out of my oilskins
.
“That will be all, Wheeler.”
A young man with golden locks, fair face and weeks of access to Miss Chumley! Now I experienced all that anguish which I had thought exaggerated by poets!
(11)
I came to myself again to hear unusual noises in the hutches on my side of the lobby. They came nearer and at last, with a knock on my door, revealed themselves to have been caused by the carpenter, Mr Gibbs, who had curious leather pads strapped to his knees.
“Sorry to trouble you, sir, but I have to follow the run of the planking.”
“What on earth for?”
Mr Gibbs scratched in his sandy hair. At a distance of about a yard I caught a whiff of strong drink.
“The fact is, sir—pardon!—they say she’s moving a bit which is what you’d expect seeing she’s so long in the tooth—”
“She’s ‘rendering like an old boot’.”
Mr Gibbs seemed gratified by my comprehension.
“Just so, sir. Just that and nothing more. Nothing to worry the passengers. It’s surprising when a gentleman like you as has been at sea no more than a dog watch knows what’s what. Mr Brocklebank when I did his cabin didn’t hardly understand what I was on about though he did give me a drink for my trouble—”
Mr Gibbs paused and eyed my bottle of brandy but I did not respond. He knelt down therefore and began to extract my two drawers from beneath my bunk which was not easy to do in that confined space.
“What the devil are you doing, Gibbs? Careful! Those are my shirts!”
“I won’t dirty your dunnage, sir, but I just has to get my hand—ah!”
“Can’t you hear me under there?”
“I got to get my hand where they’re butted—”
His speech turned instantly into a kind of squeal. He backed out, put his fingers in his mouth and sucked them, rocking from side to side and moaning.
“What have you done, Gibbs?”
He went on rocking and moaning, one hand holding the other to his mouth.
“Brandy!”
“Help yourself if you must. Good God, man, you’ve gone sallow!”
Mr Gibbs did not trouble himself with the nicety of my tumbler. He took the bottle out of its hole in the shelf above my canvas washbasin, pulled the cork with his teeth and stuck the neck in his mouth. I believe before he took another breath he had swallowed a quarter of the bottle.
“You’ll be drunk as an alderman!”
He put the bottle back in its hole, flexed his fingers and blew on them.
“After all these years to be caught that way like a ’prentice! Oh yes, she’s what you might call rendering. Some might call it that, sir, and some might call it something else but it don’t matter, do it?”
“Is there danger?”
“Rendering. You know, sir, being took flat aback didn’t do her no good at all. Yes, she’s rendering. I wouldn’t really like to say what’s going on in her one way and another—though when a man has stuck a spike into every piece of timber in the ship and had his nose to the planking like a dog after a bitch, why he gets her in his head—”
“Her?”
“Her whole shape more than if she was his own wife and neater than was ever drawed out in the loft. All the movement and every bolt—”
“Our ship?”
Mr Gibbs sat back on his heels.
“Our ship as ever is. And after all that, a man can do with a bleeding drink or two.”
“We’re in danger then!”
Mr Gibbs focused his eyes on me, frowning as if it were a great effort. He scratched again in his short, sandy hair and seemed to come to himself. His face cleared and he smiled. The smile was not convincing, however.
“Danger, Mr Talbot? Now don’t you go worrying! I’ve knowed ships you might think was falling apart and they come home to lie up snug as if they was all seasoned timber and twenty-one shillings to the guinea. Not but what—”
He paused and sucked his fingers again.
“Go on, man. Tell me!”
Mr Gibbs smiled in my direction but vaguely.
“She’s seasoned all right, sir. There isn’t a bit of wood where it matters as isn’t older than any man in the ship unless it might be Martin Davies, poor sod. The real danger you see, sir, is when you get a mix, like—seasoned and unseasoned. When I was only that high I come across a bud sticking out of a knee—must have been dead, of course, but how was I to know that? I told the chippy’s mate but he took no kind of notice of it beyond giving me a clip over the earhole.”
Mr Gibbs gave my depleted bottle of brandy a thoughtful look.
“I would advise against more brandy, Mr Gibbs.”
“Ah well. I wasn’t more than a nipper but I had nightmares about that bud. Once I woke up hollering, having fell out of the hammock and felt about in the dark for the chippy’s mate—Gilbert, he was called, had me calling him Mr Gilbert—I felt about in the dark and of course I could no more than reach the underside of the hammock to give it a prod. ‘What the fuck?’ shouts he. ‘Mr Gilbert,’ I hollers, ‘that there bud, it’s a twig!’ He leans out of his hammock and gives me a clip where he thought I was, only I wasn’t. ‘I’ll give you twig, you bit of grommet,’ he says. ‘I don’t like it,’ I says, ‘it’s putting out a leaf.’ He gives me a clip and that one took me fair between wind and water. ‘A leaf is it now,’ he says. ‘You can call me when it puts out a fucking flower.’”
Mr Gibbs seemed to find the memory pleasant, for he was shaking his head and smiling.
“There was a ship once, Mr Gibbs, put out so much greenery you could hardly see it for leaves.”
“You’re having a little joke, sir.”
“There was a vine grew out of the mast and it made everybody drunk.”
“The drunk part don’t surprise me at all, sir. What port was she said to come from?”
“She was a Greek ship, I think. Mythological.”
“That them lot used unseasoned timber don’t surprise me; but in those parts they don’t hardly drink at all! You’ll excuse me, I know—”
The man helped himself to another drink from the bottle.
“Well really, Mr Gibbs!”
“A nice drop, sir. I don’t think I’ll be in any case to work when it bites. Ah! Here it comes!”
Mr Gibbs, still sitting back on his heels, shut his eyes and swayed against the movement of the ship. There was a pause while he said nothing and my new passion returned upon me.
“Mr Benét seems a very pleasant gentleman. I imagine he might well make himself very pleasant to a lady.”
“Very pleasant all round, sir, though his parents is hemmy-grease. He wrote some poetry for the entertainment, though it was so high and mighty I couldn’t understand a word of it. The brandy is really biting, sir. I’d be glad if you don’t let on to the first lieutenant. Yes, very pleasant Mr Benét is and, Lord, he might be the other side of the Cape and making fifteen knots and a nigger if he hadn’t been so sweet on the captain’s lady!”
“Doubtless he—what did you say?”
“There I go again. Never did know when enough was enough. Everybody knows, only they didn’t say it above a whisper seeing he’s an officer. Caught them the captain did, him on his knees and she not trying to get away very hard.”
“Lady Somerset! And I, I feared that—but how was this?”
Mr Gibbs scrambled unhandily to his feet. He lurched against this table-flap at which I am writing. His face that had been sallow was now red and sweating. This together with his sandy hair made it easy to imagine a spirituous conflagration inside him! He touched his forelock in a way which I am sure is unbecoming in an officer even though he be no more than warranted. He staggered again, opened the door and went flying downhill, if I can so express it, half-way across the lobby. He returned backwards, thumped the next cabin, then was to be heard diminishingly as he made his way below. Wheeler, who must have been appliqué’d against the plywood bulkhead which formed the wall of our hutches, shut the door
for me, then opened it again and announced submissively that he would replace the drawers. There seemed no room for me in my own cabin.
“Wheeler. The ladies must have found the movement of Alcyone insupportable.”
“Yes, sir. I dare say, sir.”
“Miss—Miss Chumley must have spent the whole voyage out from England in her bunk.”
Wheeler said nothing. I was uncomfortably conscious of the impropriety of making such a remark to a servant. I tried again.
“Mr Benét—”
The words stuck in my throat. I could by no means move towards the subject which was the source of such delight and anguish to me! Yet surely there was someone to whom I might confess—it seemed that “confess” was the word—that I was in love and desired nothing so much as to talk about the Beloved Object even though I could not talk to her!
“Wheeler—”
The man was looking submissively at a point below my chin. Now he lifted his eyes and seemed to examine each part of my face in turn curiously as if the face of a man was something new and strange to him.
“Very well, Wheeler. That will be all.”
For a moment or two the man continued to stare into my face, then seemed to “come to” with a slight start.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“And another thing, Wheeler. You was a lucky dog, you know. It must have been a chance in a million! It would be proper to give thanks, you know.”
An extraordinary shudder shook the man from head to foot. He bent his head and got out of the door without looking at me again. Certainly there was no possibility of making a confidant of him—and somehow I could not feel that Charles Summers, so understanding in many ways, would be understanding in matters of the heart! It was Mr Benét or no one—Mr Benét who must surely know Miss Chumley—who was in love—who would sympathize—
How was I to follow him down into the hold?