We in the ship, I think, could no more credit what we had been through than could my correspondent. Even copying out his letter has distanced me from the event. I believe my first conscious thought was to see if Charles had suffered in any way. He was on the quarterdeck, gripping to the forrard rail and staring down into the binnacle. This made me realize where I was. Somehow I had got out of the lobby and come to the main chains which I had clutched with both hands (an enormous deadeye affording the hold) and hung there like a leaf in a spider’s web while all the madness performed itself round us. At my feet, where she had slipped from between my arms, lay Celia Brocklebank in a dead faint! Somehow we had clutched—now I remembered how she had leapt at me and I had seized her in some profound excess of human need and behaviour! But I picked her up again and bore her, wordlessly, back into the lobby while she sighed and rolled her head. I knocked on her hutch. A tremulous voice answered to my knock.
“Who is it? Who is it?”
“Mr Talbot with your wife. She has fainted.”
“Pray take her somewhere else, Mr Talbot. I am not fit—I cannot—”
With one free hand I opened the door. The old man was sitting up in his bunk with a blanket covering him to the waist. He was naked, and mephitic. Carefully I laid the girl on him and steadied her head between his fat arm and shoulder. Then I went, shutting the door behind me.
“Mrs Prettiman? It is I—Edmund.”
Her voice answered me.
“Come in.”
She was sitting by the bunk. They were holding hands—she with her left hand holding his right. I supposed they had been like that ever since I had last seen them. They were both very pale, and the two locked hands lay beside the man in the bunk as if they had been indissolubly knit and then forgotten.
Mrs Prettiman looked up at me.
“We shall live a little longer?”
“It seems so.”
She shuddered from head to foot.
“You are cold, Letty!”
“No.”
She looked down at the hands and then, using her right hand, freed her left hand delicately from his. I do not know that he even noticed, for he was watching her face.
“Don’t cry. It is unworthy of you.”
“Come, sir! Mrs Prettiman is—”
“Quiet!”
“I need,” said Mrs Prettiman with what I can only describe as rigid control, “a moment or two alone to collect myself.”
“I will leave you, ma’am.”
“No.”
I opened the door for her and she disappeared.
“Tell me what happened, Edmund.”
I gave him an account of our adventure as near as I could. I omitted, because I remembered it too little to be able to describe it, the strange way in which Celia Brocklebank and I had found ourselves together. I am sure she remembered it as little as I and I did not think such a passage was relevant to anything which Mr Prettiman would care to hear. I merely remarked that when the thing was over I picked up a woman who had fainted and restored her to her husband.
“Mrs Prettiman would not faint,” said Mr Prettiman. “She might cry but she would not faint.”
“I think, sir—”
“Well, don’t. I will not have you interfering in her education!”
“Mrs Prettiman?”
“Do you suppose that if we ever contrive to lead a caravan to found the Ideal City that she can afford feminine weaknesses? I have rid myself of the ones too prevalent among men and she must do the same as a woman!”
“Allow me to tell you, Mr Prettiman, that I have met no woman—No. Yes. I have met no grown woman who has so impressed me with her lack of those same female weaknesses as you are trying to eradicate!”
“You know nothing about it!”
“I revere Mrs Prettiman, sir, and do not mind confessing it! I—value her highly!”
“What has that to say to anything? I am an educationist, sir, and will not have any judgement in that matter questioned. A man who has worked on his own character as long as I have may perhaps be credited with some knowledge of that of others!”
“And pray, sir, what have you done with your own character to so perfect it?”
“Is it not obvious?”
“No, sir.”
“This is unendurable! To be lectured by a stubborn boy—it is endurance I have had to cultivate, sir, endurance and equanimity! Get out, before I—Of all the—”
“I am going, Mr Prettiman. But before I do, allow me to tell you—”
“No, Edmund.”
It was Mrs Prettiman. She closed the door behind her and went to her seat. Perhaps I was deceived in thinking that her eyes were a little red.
“It is agreeable,” she said, “after so much fuss to be able to sit quietly, do you not think so, Aloysius? But we have not invited Edmund to sit down and he stands there obediently. Pray be seated, Edmund. I have looked out of the lobby. We might be in a different world, you know. The sea is smooth and gentle. I would never have believed such a change possible. How do you suppose it happened?”
“I have no idea, ma’am. I have given up any intention of understanding Nature. I am now firmly on the side of those who confine their approach to the world to a wariness of it!”
There was a brisk rapping at the door.
“See who is there, Edmund, will you?”
I had not seen the man since the days of poor Colley! It was, of all people in the ship, Billy Rogers! He stood there, gigantic and smiling cheerfully. My firkin was cradled in his arms.
“Lord Talbot, sir? This here is yourn, I think, my lord, sir.”
“Oh yes—please give it to me.”
“Begging your pardon, my lord, sir, Mr Summers said I was to take it to your cabin but I dunno—”
“You don’t know my cabin, Rogers?”
For a moment the man ignored me. His wide blue eyes were staring past me to where Mrs Prettiman sat in her canvas chair. There was, I thought, a trace of speculation in them. It irritated me and disgusted me. I stepped out into the lobby and pulled the cabin door to behind me.
“In here. Put it down by the bunk.”
The man did as I told him, then straightened up and turned to me. He was tall as I and far broader—a giant.
“Will that be all, sir?”
“The men in the boat—Jones, the purser, and the little midshipman, Tommy Taylor—”
“Gone, sir. Davy Jones has them. Didn’t have time to holler, as you saw, just took. There’ll be many a man aboard this ship what will sleep more comfortable in his bunk or his hammock to know that Jones has made his last demand for payment. Thank you, Lord Talbot, sir.”
He knuckled his forehead and rolled away.
Little Tommy Taylor! Gone. Had his last laugh. Aged what? Fourteen? Fifteen? I felt a great desire to speak with someone and express the fact of the complete and irreversible absence of Tommy and I turned to the Prettimans’ door. But it occurred to me that Mrs Prettiman had never seemed as amused as I with Tommy’s antics. In fact, if I had to hazard a guess I would say that dear Mrs Prettiman, perfect in so many ways and valuing all kinds of people, would make an exception and find herself able to contemplate if not the extinction at least the absence of a dirty-minded little boy with equanimity.
(20)
This, then, if not the end of our voyage, was the beginning of the end. There was a period of some days in which everyone came to believe that our troubles were over—and seldom has a popular belief been so triumphantly vindicated! The weather, though occasionally what we would once have called rough, was never uncomfortably so. Mr Summers and Mr Benét argued politely about the longitude. But no one could believe that it was still a matter of importance since the weather was so uniformly clear that it would have been impossible to miss seeing the land even from ten miles away. The middle watch, which I continued to keep with Charles, became a time of enchantment! The stars seemed near enough to touch. Night was a harmony of blue. The sailors seemed to sing
the darkness away! During the day all those who could walked the deck, where the Pike children now played regularly and healthily. Mr Brocklebank was to be seen basking in the sun without his coach cloak. I continued to read to Mr Prettiman and once had the privilege of pacing the deck at the side of Mrs Prettiman and was proud of myself—that onetime gorgon now tamed! Indeed, I had hoped that Lieutenant Benét would observe our constitutional and be put in his place by it. But that afternoon when I read to Mr Prettiman, Mrs Prettiman did not stay to listen but excused herself and, I learnt afterwards, took an afternoon constitutional at the side of Lieutenant Benét. An encyclopaedia of behaviour could not have spoken plainer.
One morning Charles told me that I should see an operation worth watching. So it was. I came up on deck and looked round. There were no more than a very few white clouds bulging up towards the meridian. Mrs Pike leaned on the rail by the break of the fo’castle and talked with Billy Rogers as Zenobia had done before she took to her bed. Mr Gibbs with a couple of men was putting the last touches to the repair of the rail where the ice had smashed it. Under the main bitts and near it, Mrs East and the two small Pike girls were holding a dolls’ tea party! But now there was a whole series of orders from Captain Anderson and the dolls’ party was interrupted by the need to use some ropes made fast there as the ship was hove to. (Please consult Falconer, for I shall not.) Men stationed themselves all along the larboard side with sheaves of line in their hands. There was a boom rigged outboard with a lead suspended from it—a much heavier lead than the hand-lead which one man can manage. Mr Benét in the waist shouted “Let go!”; down went the lead with a pfutt! The line was abandoned all along the side of the vessel—another length lifted and at once abandoned—another and another—
“Take up the slack!”
“Charles—what is this about? Will it tell us where we are?”
“No indeed—” He paused for a moment, then smiled. “You might say it tells us where we are not.”
Now the line was no longer up and down but leading out to an angle towards the northwest.
“There is your circumpolar current, Edmund. I suppose it is the only direct evidence anyone ever had.”
“You are talking in riddles.”
“Mr Summers, would you suspend your conversation long enough to bring her over the lead?”
Charles smiled wryly. He went off and bade the parties of men alter the strain on various sheets, easing some so that their sails rounded their bellies a little, and a rustling and tinkling of water now sounded from our travelling bows. Captain Anderson smiled his brief yellow smile down at me. Well, what captain would not be happy on such a day of sunlight and whispering, chuckling, delighted water?
“Hand over hand and roundly now!”
“Up and down!”
“A hundred and ten fathom, sir.”
There was a pause while the vertical line was hauled in. At last the dripping lead itself broke the surface.
“Bear away, Mr Cumbershum. Northeast true.”
Mr Benét hailed from the waist.
“The lead is inboard, sir. Sand and shell, sir!”
The captain nodded as though he had expected this information. I turned to the first lieutenant.
“That was all very interesting. What does it signify?”
“Why, that we are in soundings. Benét had his own ideas about our longitude and the captain too. So have I and so has Cumbershum. In this visibility it does not matter much.”
He went off, about the ship’s interminable business.
“Mr Talbot. A word with you.”
I turned. Mr Brocklebank had emerged from the lobby. Once more he was massive in his wrapped coach cloak.
“What can I do for you, Mr Brocklebank?”
The old man drew close.
“I fear I did not appear at my best, sir, during the late emergency—”
“Well, you are old and cannot be expected—”
“It was not age, Mr Talbot, not decrepitude but sickness. I feared a syncope, a sudden failure of the vital organ.”
“The ship seemed almost certain to sink and that was about to settle all our problems.”
“Better without a syncope than with one. I fear the enemy within more than the sea without! You remember when Alcyone lay alongside us?”
“Indeed I do!”
“Oh, but now I remember—you was in your cabin, which was what she must have been crying about—”
“She?”
“The young lady. I was interrogating the surgeon from Alcyone when he came from your cabin but he brushed me aside! There’s a medical man for you! He went back to his ship and the women crowded round him—I understand now! They wanted to know how you went on.”
“Oh, it was Miss Chumley! It must have been!”
“Imagine that—a strong fellow like you monopolizing the surgeon, let alone the women—Good God, there never was such a consultation as I had then while two ships were parting! I halloed him and they implored him and orders were shouted and there was such a groaning and a creaking—and that silly young woman crying, ‘Mr Truscott, Mr Truscott, will he live?’ and Lady Somerset crying, ‘Marion, Marion, not before the sailors. Oh, this is so affecting’—and so much ‘Cheerily, my hearties, roundly now’—so much noise from the sails and the surgeon—can you imagine it? Just bawling back at me, ‘What do you want?’—and I crying, ‘I wish for a regimen’ and he—‘Less of the pipe, none of the bottle, less of the trencher and none of the couch, you fat old fool’—and the young one flinging her arms round Lady Somerset’s neck with a cry of ‘Oh, Helen!’ And it sheered off, Alcyone, I mean, so I have had to do the best I could without proper medical advice, which accounts for my indifferent performance when—”
“She really cried out, ‘Will he live’?”
“The young woman? Yes, or words to that effect. It may have been ‘I suppose he will live’ or ‘He may live’—”
“It must have been ‘Will he live?’ She would not have cried out the surgeon’s name twice had she not been distracted!”
“Yes. Well. She may have cried it twice, ‘Truscott, Truscott’, or perhaps it was ‘Oh, Truscott!’ or ‘Mr Truscott’!”
“Oh, God.”
“I remember it clearly. Pipe, bottle, trencher, couch. I ask you!”
“Oh, if she did not cry his name twice I am the unhappiest of men!”
“Mr Talbot, this is unlike you! I was simply explaining my conduct during the late crisis. She may have cried, ‘Truscott, Truscott, Truscott’—or more. And the worst of it is, under his regime I let more wind than I did when I was eighteen stone of solid man!”
“But she did cry out!”
“How else could I have heard her?”
“Charles had seen her the night before staring through the side of the ship—”
“So did the surgeon cry out, ‘No pipe, less trencher, no bottle and no couch’? Or was it ‘less couch’? By which he would have implied an occasional healthy recourse to the connubial. He would not have said no bottle and no trencher—and here I have been living all these weeks chaster than a nun! Women are so cruel. ‘You go right out on deck, Wilmot,’ she says. ‘I cannot endure your horrid smells. Besides, I believe it is bad for my complexion.’”
“And Miss Chumley expressed the deepest concern for my welfare!”
I waited for a reply, but the old man, one hand on the bulwarks, his feet spread wide, had lapsed into a state of concentration on his interior. I withdrew quickly.
So I added yet another atom of comfort and torment to the cobweb-thin collection of yearnings and surmises that bound me to her.
*
There is, I suppose, only one moment of drama towards which the reader is still looking. When, after this year-long or nearly year-long voyage, did we sight land? I sympathize with the reader’s suspense. It has been, it still is, a difficulty to me too. The truth is that our first sight of land was about as undramatic as it could well be. I have thought now and the
n of ways round this dull patch. I had thought of introducing the slapstick, the low comedy of Nature making fools of everyone in sight. I pictured a misty morning, a slight air; and the moment at which someone on the ship, preferably a woman or child, realizes the ludicrous truth. There are gales of laughter from the crew and sheepish grins from our navigators. We are aground in still water, which sinks away slowly to leave us high and dry—and what is more, as the mist is drunk up by the sun, we see that we are able, by the use of ladders, to step ashore! But a certain synaesthesia with our noble vessel tells me that in such a case there would have been three dreadful reports as the weight came wholly on Charles’s frapping and the hull subsided into its own weed and ballast and spread like—anything that melts in the sun!
Then again, I thought of preserving the truth but sharpening it a little. There was, for example, a hole in the bulwarks under the main chains, and examining this with Mr Askew, the gunner, I learnt about the dreadful art or craft of cannon-ball rolling. A disaffected sailor is able to lift a cannon ball out of a shot garland and allow it to decide for itself what damage it will do. Mr Askew—he muttered the information, for it is not to be spread throughout the lower deck of a ship—informed me that as a ship works, such a cannon ball, in an unfortunate case, is able to fly the full length of the vessel and take apart the random target as brutally as if it had been shot from a gun. But the hole had not been made by a cannon ball or there would have been damage to the main chains as well. Perhaps the ice did it, though I myself am inclined to rats. But build up the suggestion of disaffection, detect a mutter here and there, and you have your high drama to take the place of the low comedy. There is a confrontation. The crew and the emigrants inch out of the fo’castle threateningly. Captain Anderson is proud and defiant. The men move forward. One is about to strike a—