I was about to express my surprise when we were interrupted by a terrible cry from Prettiman. Even Charles, inured as he must be to other men’s suffering, winced as he heard it.
“Let us get on deck. Come, Edmund! You will need care. The weather has worsened, as I thought.”
He led the way to the waist, where water foamed about my knees, then sank away.
“Good God!”
“Up with you!”
Now at last I did begin to understand about the Southern Ocean. We had no more than a scrap of sail set. Our roll seemed slower. I laboured up the stairs against the wind, and when we came into the open space of the quarterdeck I experienced what I should not have thought possible. The wind, which on other occasions I had thought severe enough in seeking to blow my mouth open, now did the same to my eyes, and no matter how I screwed up the lids the wind forced them open, a crack, through which I could see nothing but blurred light. I got into the lee of the poop and learned how to make a shade of my hands, which enabled me to see more or less clearly.
“Up on the poop. Are you man enough?”
He laboured up the stairs with me behind him. Now this was the open air. The very lanterns on their painted ironwork vibrated. We crept round the rail and then with eyes blasted open turned sideways and squinted for glimpses but could see nothing. It was not surprising. There seemed nothing to distinguish wind from water, spray from foam, cloud from light, small shot from rain! I bent my head and examined my body. I had a shadow. But this was not the absence or diminution of light, it was the absence of mist, of rain, of spray. Charles had the same shadow; and now as I looked sideways across the wind I saw that every element in the rail, the turned uprights, the rail itself, had the same shadow.
“Why are we here? There is nothing to see! Is not the middle enough!”
He did not turn nor reply but made a dismissive and perhaps irritable gesture. The seamen were dragging and lifting those same curious, wobbling sacks that had looked so much like bodies in the semi-darkness. Now I saw that they were full of liquid and attached to ropes. Charles had a large sailmaker’s needle in his hand which he stabbed into the bags several times.
“Over with them!”
The men toppled the bags over the rail and into the sea. A wave rose up, a whole plateau of moving water. A secondary wave appeared on its surface, was torn off by the droning wind and hurled at us like a storm of shot.
“Belay!”
I turned and looked forward in time to see the bows slide back down from the plateau which had outsped us. I felt our stern rise. I turned to see other plateaux following us, the one partly hiding the next, a monstrous procession marching endlessly round the world and creating a place which surely was not for men!
“What have you done?”
“Look.”
I followed his pointing finger. A plateau had heaved up slowly with every complication of tormented water on its surface as shot to strike us. Then, at the very farthest edge of what was visible, I saw a gleam of silver. It was spreading, drawing out into a kind of path astern of us not unlike that path of light which we see in water beneath the moon or sun. But this was very mild silver, glossy and unblemished. It was definite as a lane in chalk country. It shone beneath the fits and whirls of spray, the waves on waves which flew into the air like nightmare birds.
“Oil!”
A place for no man: for sea gods perhaps; for that great and ultimate power which surely must support the visible universe and before which men can do no more than mouth the life-defining and controlling words of the experience of living.
“Oil on troubled waters.”
(11)
So it was. No matter how the waves pursued us and threatened to overwhelm us, when they reached that streak of silver it subdued them more thoroughly than a great rock or—if it were possible—some breakwater or quay. It is a marvel in the physical world how a vegetable oil, expressed from the tenderest and most ephemeral of Nature’s inventions, can yet subdue the rage of a tempest as Orpheus put Hades to sleep! I am aware that the fact is thought to be a commonplace—but only by those whose lives have not been saved by this thinnest and most fragile of threads! The silver pathway reached now to within fifty yards of our stern and in that unoiled fifty yards of water the malicious sea had no time to organize its fury. We still rose up and sank. Still the water welled over our flanks and made a bath of the waist where the black lifelines twitched and vibrated above it, but there was a saving smoothness in our motion!
“Charles! I would not have believed it!”
He beckoned me down from the poop to the quarterdeck. I came down and he drew me aside into the lee of the bulkhead.
“I wanted you to see that I too have my ideas.”
“I never doubted that!”
He laughed excitedly.
“Normally we should heave to and spill oil over the bows, you see? Then the ship would be more or less stationary and we should make a wide area of oil to windward, but now we cannot afford the time. We must get on. I have to tell you that our supply of vegetable oil is limited; but so long as it lasts we may run before a following sea in safety—comparative safety.”
“As long as the oil lasts.”
“Just so.”
“And the pumping?”
“Pumping will increase, naturally. But not too much.”
He nodded, laboured away across the quarterdeck, spoke to the quartermaster, then, pushed by the wind, made a rapid and irregular descent to the waist and disappeared from view. I followed in my turn, ignoring the officer of the watch for once in a rare obedience to the captain’s standing orders! I entered the passenger saloon and yelled for Bates who brought me beans and a small portion of pork.
“Brandy too, Bates.”
He went off to get a drink and I sat, guarding my food but slewed so that I could see our oil, our silver snail trail. Far off I heard again that terrible cry from the dying Prettiman. He should have had the paregoric as a wedding present I thought. We should all have it. Oil or not, the best thing for us all would be unconsciousness. I sat for hours, numbed by the sea, until at last darkness drove me to my bunk. It now seemed as if the very regularity of our motion, immense as it was, gave us time to brood! I cannot say I slept. I was conscious that the ship still swum, and that we were alive. That was all. I believe lack of sleep came near to unsettling my wits.
Of the middle watch that night I remember little, although for me it was short. When the call came I huddled my way through solid wind to the quarterdeck and crouched in the lee of the poop. I do remember the light, for it was a storm light and not to be described—which is one reason why people who have never seen it do not believe in it. It seemed to inhere in the very atmosphere!
Presently Charles worked his way to me and crouched down.
“Get back to your cabin, Edmund. You can do no good here.”
“When will it stop?”
“How can I tell? But you must go down. Cumbershum has fallen.”
“Oh, that is terrible! If even Cumbershum—”
“He is not hurt. I mean if a man so used to this sort of thing—you see? Come. I will go with you to the break of the quarterdeck. Your best place is in your bunk. Stay there!”
This conversation was not in the heroic vein. I can only plead that if I dared the deck at all during that twenty-four hours it was more than any other passenger did. I doubt that they were more frightened than I. Possibly they simply had more sense. In the passenger saloon Bates told me that the emigrants and the off-duty watch had received permission from Charles to keep their hammocks slung and turn into them. I cannot think what the state of that overcrowded deck was, for occasional seas seemed to sweep the waist and run down off the fo’castle like a waterfall. We rolled a little but other than that the ship seemed to lift up and down without pitching at all, as if she were held in a narrow channel which denied her any other movement.
I got to my cabin at length, fell on my bunk and lay there exhaus
ted, though I had done nothing. I even slept at last and woke in a grey morning light while the wind still droned. How that waking to a merciless noise and movement clutched at my poor heart! What must it have done to the children? Or could their parents and friends persuade them that all was well? Oh no! The pallid face, the quivering mouth had a plainer language than mere words. The voice which attempts to whisper, then finds itself suddenly and unexpectedly loud, the flashes of anger, the tears, the hysteria—no, I do not think the children were unaware, poor things!
It was the afternoon, with no change in our situation, before I pulled myself together sufficiently to get out of my bunk. The basest necessity drove me: after which, oilskins and all, I made my way to the saloon. Mr Bowles was there, sitting under the window and looking at nothing. I sat near him and looked at nothing too, but there was a touch of comradely suffering about this nothing. After a long time he spoke.
“Pumping.”
“Yes.”
“Soon they will need us too.”
“Yes.”
“Frankly—”
There was another long silence. Then Bowles cleared his throat and spoke again.
“Frankly I ask myself whether I should give up hope, crawl away and huddle into my bunk—”
“I have done so. It is no help.”
The door of the saloon burst open. Oldmeadow, the young Army officer, reeled in and flung himself on the bench facing us. He was breathing in gasps. His face was smeared with dirt.
“I suppose—you expect the ship to be run for your convenience.”
“Is that intended as an insult?”
“How like you, Talbot! Talk when you have hands like these!”
He spread them before us. The palms were blistered and bloody.
“Pumping did that. He took my men without so much as a by-your-leave! ‘Your men must pump,’ he said.”
“Mr Summers!”
“Your crony, Lieutenant bloody Summers—”
“Take that word back!”
“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!”
“I’m tired of you, Oldmeadow! You’ll answer me for this!”
“Do you think I’m going to shoot you, Talbot, just to save the sea trouble? I said to Summers, ‘Why can’t you take the passengers, Bowles, Pike, Talbot, Weekes, Brocklebank?’ Even that sodden old wreck would last a minute or two. I am—”
Oldmeadow collapsed over the table. Bowles got up and laboured round to him. Oldmeadow snarled:
“Let me be, curse you!”
He hauled himself upright and staggered away to his hutch. Bowles made his way uphill, then downhill, to his seat and fell into it as the ship came up and hit him. So we sat, the two of us, saying nothing.
Late that afternoon I left Bowles there and went to the necessity and sat by the humming rope which helped to drag our bags of oil. For all the snail-trail the place seemed as much under the sea as on it. When I came back to the saloon through a wash of seawater Bowles had gone. I had scarce reached my seat when the door opened and Pike came in. He had little enough to recommend him to the society of other men but there was no doubt about it—his dwarfishness was a positive help in preserving him from injury. Now he came skating or perhaps levitating across the uneasy deck and landed on the bench opposite me like a bird on a twig. He was pale but seemed sober.
“Good afternoon, Edmund. This is a fearful storm.”
“It will blow itself out, Mr Pike.”
“You were going to call me Richard, Edmund.”
“Oh, God. Bowles, Oldmeadow—and now you! Richard then.”
“It sounds cosier, Edmund, do you not find?”
“No, I do not.”
“Friendlier like.”
“Oh, for—how is your family—Richard?”
“Mrs Pike—you may have heard, Edmund, we have had words. It happens in every family, Edmund, between married people—”
“I doubt it.”
“Well, you are not married, are you?”
“What the devil do you mean by that?”
“Married people understand. Since Mr and Mrs East took to helping Mrs Pike, our little girls have been better, there is no doubt about that.”
“It is time we had some good news.”
“Oh yes. Do you know, I am convinced that weeks ago when the dragrope pulled a piece off the keel—”
“You sound like a professional seaman, Mr Pike.”
“—I was convinced that they were dying. But since we adopted Mr Benét’s idea they have improved immensely.”
“Another of Mr Benét’s ideas?”
“He said they were getting weaker because of seasickness and the continual motion. He said that Nelson was the same.”
“Oh no!”
“He said that Nelson had a cot rigged up for him so that it swung freely while the ship moved about it. He said—”
I was standing on my feet and fell sideways.
“But that was my idea!”
“He said that if we rigged hammocks for them the motion would be easier and they would think it a game—”
“But that was exactly my idea!”
“It doesn’t matter whose idea it was, Edmund. It worked and they have been getting better ever since.”
“I went there. I went to the cabin. I knocked and opened the door. Miss Granham was there. She looked at me as I opened my mouth to tell her this same idea but before I could get a word out, she—shut me up! Those stony eyes!—‘Do not say anything, Mr Talbot. Just go!’”
“Like I say, Edmund, it doesn’t matter whose idea it was, does it? They’re better, you see.”
“I will strangle that woman!”
“Who, Edmund?”
“Just because he has yellow hair and a face like a girl’s—God damn and blast my soul to eternal bloody perdition!”
“Edmund! Edmund!”
I sat down with a thump. I was hot inside my oilskins and jarred from the seat. I cursed and tore my oilskins open.
“She has set out deliberately to put me down from the very first moment we met!”
“Why are you angry? They are better!”
“I am glad, Pike—”
“Richard.”
“Richard then. I am very glad. Your little girls are better and that is all that matters. I will—”
“Mrs East is very helpful. She sings to them and teaches them songs. I do not think Phoebe is very musical but Arabella sings like a lark. I have quite a good voice, you know.”
“I suppose so.”
“You are talking very peculiar, Edmund. Have you been drinking?”
I suppose he went on talking. I did not notice. He was an unnoticeable little man. When I came to myself I was alone.
“Bates! Where the devil is my brandy?”
“Here, sir. I got it from Webber, sir. We got to go easy with it.”
“Bring me some more.”
“Sir?”
I held out the empty glass and he took it away.
This was the beginning of it all. The period is one of which I am still ashamed and shall always be so, I think. Rage fed on rage. It was Mrs Prettiman’s fault, of course—but he, Benét, with his plain theft of my idea for helping the little girls—she had taken from him, accepted from him what she would not accept from me. Say nothing, Mr Talbot. Just go away. The two of them colluded—
There came a point where I found myself standing in the dim lobby with seawater cornering in diagonals and triangles which consumed themselves against the doors and bulkheads. I had some idea of confronting them—but where was Benét? I went looking for him, therefore, unhandily out into the open where the black lifelines shook above water and under it; and there, as Fate willed it, came the man himself, out from the fo’castle where he had been about some employment with or for his ironwork perhaps! He seemed not to see me but swept off his hat, shook out his yellow hair in apparent joy at release from the stench of below decks—and, just as I was about to accost him, dashed past me as if I did not exist! I foll
owed him at once into the lobby. Benét was gravely examining the captain’s standing orders as he yielded to the motion of the ship while seawater washed over his boots.
“Are the captain’s standing orders not familiar to you, Mr Benét? You had best be about your business—stealing ideas, pulling pieces off the ship or sticking a mast through the ship’s bottom!”
Mr Benét “looked down his nose at me”. He was able to do this despite my height, since I was hanging on to the rail outside my cabin.
“A hole or two in a ship’s bottom is of no consequence, Talbot. Pull out the bung in a ship’s boat, stick your knife blade through and, provided the boat is making enough way, all the bilgewater will run out.”
“Where did you steal that idea?”
“I do not steal ideas!”
“I am not convinced of that.”
“Your convictions are irrelevant.”
“The little girls were in peril. We are all in peril, you fool!”
“I am not a fool! Leave my name alone, sir!”
“I say you are!”
“That I will not allow! You will answer to me for that!”
“Listen, Benét!”
It was at this point that as far as I was concerned the whole conversation became incoherent. I do not mean unintelligible, for each separate remark or sentence made clear sense. But they added up to confusion. Mr Benét appeared to be giving me his family history with increasing acerbity while I accused him of dishonesty. He replied that I was perfidious like all my race! I replied with a threat of violence and made it the precise suggestion of pistolling a young gentleman of French extraction. This he countered with a brief description—
“Ah, the English! When one first meets them one dislikes them—but when one gets to know them, dislike turns to genuine loathing!”
The door of Prettiman’s cabin opened and Mrs Prettiman looked out. She had changed back into slops. She saw who were standing outside and quickly disappeared again. Mrs Prettiman’s ample hair was wholly undone. There had been little of her visible but her face and the hair. In the silence between Benét and me that followed her appearance and swift disappearance we heard Mr Prettiman cry out. But the silence cleared our confusion and deepened the quarrel.