To the Ends of the Earth (29 page)

“Do, Mr Deverel—Jack? Let me think.”

He sat back and slumped a little as if some strain had gone out of him. He seemed almost respectful as before a Thinker! But the truth was—

“Look, Deverel—”

“It was Jack just now, let alone when we were about to board.”

“Aye! That was a moment we shall remember—eh? Jack, then. But look. I’ve had the devil of a clout or three clouts over the head—I’m really in no condition to think at all. It aches still.”

“A glass—”

I made an involuntary and impatient gesture with my right hand.

“You know—I would like—I will—do what can be done. The first thing is for me to speak to Summers.”

“Good God! The man’s a Methodist!”

“Is he so? I know him deeply concerned with moral questions but had not thought—”

“Is that the best you can do?” 

“It’s the first step. I must know what the situation is, I mean in, in naval law. You are too personally involved and do not yet see the thing clearly.”

“You were present!”

“In body, yes, but I was unconscious. The wits had been knocked out of me by a rope’s end.”

“And this is your offer of help?”

“The trouble with you, Deverel, is you want everything done at once.”

“Thank you,
Mr
Talbot!”

“I am trying to help. You must not expect from me the instant action of a naval officer.”

“By God, I do not!”

“Be easy again! You cannot go at this as if you was boarding an enemy. Haste will ruin all.”

“What? With two post captains and half a dozen
lieutenants
senior to me in these ships? They can fix me with a court-martial as easy as kiss my arse! Devil take it and you!”

“Jack!”

The word was emollient. Strange again! Though he looked sullen and his breast heaved, nevertheless he spoke in a lower tone. “There is enough of them to fix up a
court-martial
here and now.”

“When the wind may send us on our way at any moment? You know I am not instructed in naval matters but I would swear they cannot try you at sea. It is no longer wartime and not as if there was a mutiny. You have not offered the man violence! Besides, deuce take it, while the weather holds we are to have a ball and an entertainment and as if that was not enough I am to dine with Sir Henry! Confound it, man, can you not see that with the peace and abdication and this resolution of a great crisis in the affairs of the civilized world—”

Deverel jerked upright between his hands on the edge of the bunk. 

“Dinner? Why, man, there’s your opportunity! Anderson will be there, depend on it! A word with him in Sir Henry’s hearing after the drinks have gone round—”

“He hardly drinks at all. Besides—”

All at once I was aware of how my wounded head was humming. No—singing!

“If you knew how my cursed head aches!”

“You’ll do nothing then.”

“I will find out how the land lies—if the expression means anything in this limbo of streaming water! There is much that may be done if we go about it carefully.”

“You mean I must wait. Endure this humiliation from a man my father would not have at his table!”

“I will endeavour my best in your behalf, little though that best may be.”

“There’s no need to get your rag out!”

The cant expression amused me. I had indeed spoken with a degree of warmth. But somehow it made Deverel more likeable. He saw my involuntary smile,
misinterpreted
it and was about to fire up again, so that I spoke hurriedly and almost at random.

“I will lead the conversation to duelling if Anderson is there and try to find out what his reaction would be to a challenge.”

“Why—he may have a positive horror of being shot at!”

I looked at him in sheer astonishment. Anderson, a post captain who by report had taken part in bloody
engagements
! Anderson who had
boarded
as a midshipman and later taken a fire ship into the Basque Roads under Cochrane! There was more here than I had foreseen. Deverel was now excited in a way that a single glass of my brandy could not account for. He was hectic and rubbing his hands and grinning! I tried to bring him down.

“What is more to the point, my dear sir, is that he may have the strength—what some people would call the 
strength of mind—to reject any challenge out of hand. There is a strong feeling about in the country that it is folly to set life itself at stake in a trivial matter. Not, of course, that your affair is trivial but others may think it so.”

“They do, they do.”

“I will sound him out.”

“No more?”

“At the moment I
can
do no more.”

“At the moment. It is a convenient phrase, sir.”

I said nothing. Deverel eyed me critically. Then his expression changed to a veritable sneer. I spoke shortly.

“I repeat. I can do no more at the moment.”

He said nothing for a while but looked towards the mirror above my canvas basin. Then—

“Like the others.”

I made no comment. He went on.

“Oh, I know about Gentleman Jack and Dashing Jack, but do you not detect the sneer? Remember when Colley was slung overboard, Summers deliberately delayed telling me the driver should be afted until the rudder nigh on
carried
away? But I thought you who was a gentleman and not one of the cursed jumped-up lubbers, at least you would be on my side and not set out to ruin me—”

“You must be mad!”

He said nothing but after a few more moments stood up slowly. He looked at me sideways and began to smile unpleasantly, a kind of inward or withdrawn smile as of one who has infinite comprehension and wariness among enemies. He opened the cabin door, glanced quickly this way and that, then fairly darted out of sight. He left me in a state of great perplexity and confusion. The worst of it was I had committed myself to a degree of intimacy with the man and now felt little inclined to interfere with his punishment for what I could not but see as the just result of his neglect of duty. Above all I did not wish to injure in 
any way the degree of understanding and mutual tolerance which now existed between me and Captain Anderson. It was all most provoking. I had nothing to push me towards engaging in an advocacy in this instance and believed more and more, to use an abrupt phrase, that Deverel was simply not worth it.

I was called back to immediacy by the sound of the ship’s bells. This was the very hour at which we were
summoned
to the feast! I glanced into the glass, settled my hair round my wound (hesitated for a moment—why go? why not turn in?). However, I settled my clothing and made my way through the new milliner’s shop. As I did so I heard, among all the shuffling of naked feet, the sound of firm and familiar footsteps above my head. I followed the captain to the broad gangway down which he strode. He stood rigid at the bottom, his hat held across his chest. I, following close, had much ado to prevent myself from crashing into him. I had the wit, however, to seize a side rope with my left hand, snatch my hat off with my right, then stand nearly as rigid as the captain. The deck round the foot of the gangway was crowded and the ceremonial nearly as elaborate as that for Colley’s funeral. Here were sideboys with white gloves, boatswains with calls, marines with muskets, more marines with drums and trumpets, some midshipmen, and a lieutenant or two—and glittering at the end of the lane of ceremonial stood Sir Henry Somerset, unkindly wearing full uniform, the ribbon of his order strained into creases across the white splendour of his embonpoint! The trumpets blared, the drums
ruffled
, the calls screeched, our working parties stood to
attention
staring into the mist. All this at a man’s stepping from one plank to another! The ceremony came to an end. Captain Anderson was now properly aboard
Alcyone
and the two crews might go about their business which I
myself
thought astonishingly various and complex, in view of 
the state of the weather, for from the gangway we could hardly see either end of the ships. I stepped forward
myself
, to be greeted most affably by Sir Henry who had not the privilege of knowing my godfather, though he had, like all the world—and so on. He conducted us towards his own quarters, talking all the time to our captain. Naval warfare is a lottery! Sir Henry is large rather than impressive. His wealth showed everywhere. Any touches of moulding about the poop were gilded. We walked to the ladder—no, I refuse to be seduced—to the stairs, along a pathway of coir matting laid lest our feet should be soiled by the melting seams. There were canvas chimneys leading up from the quarterdeck and secured to the mizzen
rigging
—devil take it, I find my determination
not
to speak Tarpaulin almost impossible to sustain!—in an attempt to replace the fetor of a ship’s interior with purer air. We reached the quarterdeck and the end of the coir matting. I looked down and began carefully and unsuccessfully to avoid the seams when Sir Henry took notice of my attempt.

“Do not trouble yourself, Mr Talbot, I beg. There is nothing here to foul your feet.”

Captain Anderson had stopped too and was looking down.

“Splined, by God!”

It seemed my Tarpaulin was to increase just as I was abandoning it.

“Splined, Sir Henry?”

Sir Henry waved a hand in a dismissive way.

“There was a cargo of rare woods among my prizes. Very fortunate. It is ebony, you know.”

“But
splined
, Sir Henry?”

“It means replacing the tar and oakum which is
commonly
used, and makes such a damned mess of our feet, by strips of hard wood. The narrow planks are mahogany. I took up the idea from what I saw aboard the royal yacht 
when I had the honour of being presented to His Royal Highness. Everything is Bristol Fashion there, I can tell you! After you, Captain Anderson, Mr Talbot.”

“After you, sir.”

“Pray, sir—”

We descended to the stateroom. The lady who came towards us did not so much walk, or even float, as swim. Lady Somerset had an immediate claim on any gentleman’s attention. She was a fine and most handsome woman and dressed in the height of fashion—indeed her costume was more suitable, I thought, for the evening than the middle of the day! Was this “informal dress”? On her bosom there glittered a positive appanage of sapphires which matched those at her ears and wrists. Sir Henry must have
intercepted
the jeweller to the Porte! Her gown was girt high under her bosom in what—but I have not yet learned to talk Milliner. Nor had I more than a moment to take in her appearance, for she was leaning towards me and moaning. I cannot by any other word describe the way in which having acknowledged Anderson’s abrupt attention, abrupt nod down up—she broke from him, insinuated herself in my direction, gazed earnestly up into my eyes as if we were present at an occasion of most moving importance, then insinuated herself back to our captain and murmured in a deep contralto voice, “Such pleasure!” Since she appeared to be about to swoon at the thought of the pleasure, it was perhaps fitting that she should hold out a hand to each of us as if appealing for support. She was, however, a little too fragrant for my taste. Now I was lifting my hand towards hers when with a movement like that of weed in water she swung both hands in the other direction and moaned again.

“Dearest, valuable Janet!”

There was little doubt about the nature of valuable Janet. She held an embroidery frame in one hand with its material—the needle and thread still stuck in the pattern—
together with a fan upside down: and in the other hand a book with one finger marking the page from which she had been reading. She held a cushion under her arm and, as if that load were not enough, a length of ribbon was clenched in her teeth. She appeared to me to be a female of
extraordinary
plainness. Busily sorting these new people according to what information I had, I at once put her in the compartment labelled “companion”. As I did so she made a ducking curtsey, then bolted out of the stateroom.

“Miss Oates,” murmured Lady Somerset, “a
kinswoman
.”

“A distant kinswoman,” amplified Sir Henry. “Lady Somerset will not be parted from her. It is her generous heart. She will keep her and how could I say no?”

“Dear Sir Henry, he refuses me nothing, but nothing!”

I was about to make the expected gallant reply when Sir Henry’s face brightened and he spoke in a more
energetic
voice.

“Come in, Marion, come in! I was laying odds that you would be up and about!”

The lightning that struck the top of the mizzenmast ran down, and melted the conductor into white hot drops. The mast split and flinders shot every way into the mist. The deckhead burst open and the electrical fluid destroyed me. It surrounded the girl who stood before me with a white line of light.

“Captain Anderson, may I present you? Mr Talbot? Miss Chumley. You look delightfully, Marion, quite the belle—if it were not for, of course—This is Mr Edmund
FitzHenry
Talbot, my dear. Lady Talbot is a FitzHenry and Mr Talbot is proceeding—”

He must have continued to talk, I suppose. I came to as if from another concussion to find that the gentlemen were holding glasses and strangely there was one in my own hand. Since it is clear that I performed the act of taking a glass and continued to hold it in those first few moments of life I can only suppose that I had been talking as well but what my first words were I am quite unable to say. Oh,
thou
, Marion, rising from the meekest and deepest of
curtsies
, sum of all music, all poetry, distracted scraps of which with their newly irradiated meaning tumbled through my mind! But it was Sir Henry’s words I heard when I first emerged from my destroyed state.

“Poor Marion has been positively prostrate! The
slightest
movement, good God, not just a lop but the least
shudder
at anchor, and up it all comes! Once she is in India, as I tell her, she must stay there for good, for the return
journey
would surely make an end of her!”

“
Alcyone
is lively then, Sir Henry?”

“So-so, Captain Anderson. She is long for her top hamper and ‘utmost dispatch’ is ‘utmost dispatch’, you know. How is your ship?”

“Steady as a rock, Sir Henry, and dead beat as a compass card. Why—even when that fool of a lieutenant allowed her to be taken aback she put her rail under for less than ten seconds by my reckoning and in a fresh breeze too!” 

“Sir Henry, Captain Anderson, you are making the poor child quite pale! Come, Marion, the gentlemen will say no more about it. The floor is steady as a ballroom and I have seen you happy enough on that!”

“Why,” said Captain Anderson, “I believe we are to hold a ball aboard my ship which is even steadier than this.”

“
Alcyone
,” moaned Lady Somerset, “
anything
is steadier than this beautiful, wild creature!”

I found my conscious voice at last.

“I am certain beyond a peradventure that Captain Anderson would offer his vessel as a refuge for the rest of your journey, Miss, Miss—Chumley!”

Miss Chumley smiled—Marion smiled! The corners of her mouth turned up—my very heart jumps at the memory—it is a sweet pleasure to try to record it. Yet even when Marion was not smiling nature had provided her with a mouth which made her look not merely
good-humoured
but as if she were enjoying a joke of such power it was a source of permanent pleasure. But I had no sooner begun to find that the only cure for staring impolitely at this mouth was to stare even more impolitely—and more helplessly—at the eyes above it, which ignores her little nose—says nothing of those eyebrows that implied
astonishment
which by reason of the smiling mouth meant that her whole expression was lively and interested—oh, Lord! The trouble is that since the days of Homer the greatest of poets have exercised the utmost of their art in the
description
of young women. There is no eloquence, not a figure of speech from understatement to hyperbole that has not been laid under contribution! Go outside the common rules of rhetoric—look for an inspired absurdity, the
positively
insolent magic of a Shakespeare or a Virgil—

I have got in a tangle and am going nowhere. How was she dressed? It did not seem to matter at the time, but now— 

Her dress was white. Blue ribbon I
think
was threaded through the neckline from shoulder to shoulder and round the ruched sleeves just above the elbows. Her earrings were silver flowers and a chain of the same lay round her neck above the promise of her bosom. She was slight, would always be slight, always suggest, imply more than state—like the greatest of poets!

But Captain Anderson was speaking—had spoken. I recall the words I was not then conscious of hearing.

“No, no, Mr Talbot. We are not going to India but Sydney Cove! Besides, our ship is full of emigrants, passengers, cargo—”

“You see, my dear,” said Sir Henry, laughing, “there is no help for it! To India you must go and in
Alcyone
too!”

“I cannot understand,” said Lady Somerset, “why there should be such an absolute requirement from naval
gentlemen
of haste now that we have defeated the French. Surely Captain Anderson—”

Both naval gentlemen laughed. Yes, Anderson laughed!

I found my voice again.

“Miss Chumley, if you will take passage with us I will abandon my cabin to you. I will sleep in the orlop or the bilges. I will guarantee to spend the nights pacing the deck on the side opposite to Captain Anderson—but come, sir—we
have
an empty cabin. I will move there instantly and Miss Chumley shall have mine!”

I believe all this was said in a sleepwalking voice. Men should be poets—I understand that now, Edmund, Edmund, thou scurvy politician!

Anderson was giving a brief account of Colley—how intemperate he had been and how at last after a shocking escapade he had succumbed to a
low fever
. But my
determination
to defend the memory of Mr Colley was a distant thing. My journal did that well enough and I put the 
thought aside. The lightning stroke, the
coup de foudre
, was all.

“The rumour went, Miss Chumley, that you was a prodigy which word I discounted but now I see it was no more than the truth.”

“Prodigy, Mr Talbot?”

“Prodigy, Miss Chumley!”

Her answer was a peal of laughter silvery as the flowers round her neck.

“The word was wrongly reported to you, sir. Lady Somerset is sometimes kind enough to refer to me as her ‘protégée’.”

“For me, Miss Chumley, a prodigy, ever and always.”

She still smiled but looked slightly puzzled—as well she might; for whatever the lightning had done to me, for her it had been no more than the experience of something—someone—unexpectedly and impossibly familiar; I mean familiar in the sense of recognized to be known, and
perhaps
also encroaching! Indeed, having guessed that this was so I immediately had proof of it.

“We have not met before, sir?”

“Indeed, Miss Chumley, I should remember if we had!”

“Of course. Then since we are unknown to each other—”

She paused, looking away, laughed uncertainly, then looked back and was silent. So was I; and we both
examined
the other’s face with a serious intentness. I was the first to speak.

“We have—and have not!”

She glanced down and I saw that my left hand held her right one. I was not conscious of taking it and let go with a gesture of apology which she dismissed with a shake of the head.

I was aware of Sir Henry speaking by no means in the voice with which he had greeted Miss Chumley. 

“Oh, come straight in, for heaven’s sake, Janet! You need not be scared nor say anything, for you was only brought in to make up the numbers.”

“Dearest Janet! There, if you please, between Captain Anderson and Sir Henry.”

I drew back a chair for Lady Somerset who insinuated herself. Sir Henry did the same for Miss Chumley and I suppose Anderson did the same for the invaluable and unfortunate Janet. I could not but be involved with my hostess for a while and made a sad business of it, for most of my attention was on Sir Henry who was telling Miss Chumley what a pity it was that she could not sing in the entertainment and let the people hear what was meant by real singing. Fortunately Lady Somerset had the social perceptions which seem natural to women of any race or clime. For she turned away and engaged Anderson in a
trivial
conversation which nevertheless must have been a relief to him. He had been staring glumly and silently at Janet whose eyes were deep in her plate. Satisfied, I think, that Anderson was being looked after, Sir Henry began to eat with an assiduity which fully explained the rotundity of his person. Miss Chumley was pushing a little food round her plate with a fork but I did not see any of it touch her mouth.

“You are not hungry?”

“No.”

“Then neither am I.”

“All the same, sir, you must trifle with your fork, so. Is that not elegant?”

“It is charming. But, Miss Chumley, if you persist in declining food you will become even more ethereal.”

“You could not have said anything more flattering to a young person, sir, nor held out a happier prospect!”

“For you perhaps; but for me the happiest prospect would be—no, forgive me. I presume on—dare I say—oh, indeed I must! An immediate sympathy, a recognition—” 

“‘We have—and have not’?”

“Oh, Miss Chumley! I am dazed—no—dazzled! Rescue me, for heaven’s sake!”

“That is easily done, sir. If we are to entertain each other let me tell you quickly what you have in hand. I am an orphan, sir, learned my three R’s, considerable French, some Italian and Geography at an establishment for the children of clergymen in Salisbury Close. I am also able to recite you the Kings of England, ending with ‘George, the third of that name whom may God preserve’. I am, of course, pious, modest, clever with my detestable needle and can sing very nearly in tune.”

“I beg you to eat at least a little, for all these
accomplishments
need to be sustained!”

The wondrous creature actually leaned a little towards me. Our heads came intoxicatingly close.

“Be easy, Mr Talbot. I am also a little devious and at the moment not at all hungry!”

“Miss Chumley, do not say it! Oh no! Biscuits in your cabin!”

The genuine and silvery laughter rang round the
stateroom
.

“Mr Talbot, I thought the secret would not disgust you!”

“You have bewitched me already. You must have done so before—when we last met, in—oh, Cathay, Tartary, Timbuctoo, where was it?”

Sir Henry interrupted his mastication for a moment.

“You have travelled, Talbot?”

“No, Sir Henry.”

“Well I am sure Marion has not.”

She laughed again.

“Mr Talbot and I are making up a fairy story, uncle. You must none of you listen, for it is great nonsense.”

“Nonsense, Miss Chumley? You cut me to the quick.”

Our heads drew together again. 

“I would never do that, Mr Talbot. And fairy tales are not nonsense to some.”

I still cannot tell why tears came to my eyes! A grown man, a sane, really rather calculating man, a political
creature
to have water spring up behind his eyelids so that he is hard put to it to keep them from falling out down his face!

“Miss Chumley, you make me—inexpressibly happy. I rejoice to be wholly defenceless.”

There was a pause while I swallowed not food but tears. Oh yes, it was my wounded head, my sleeplessness, it must have been—it could not have been what I knew it was!

But she was murmuring.

“We go too fast. Forgive me, sir, I have said more than I should and you too, I believe.” Then looking round: “We have silenced the table! Helen!”

But Lady Somerset, dear woman, came to my rescue.

“And what have we older ones to say that is more
important
? Enjoy yourselves, my dears, while you may!”

Anderson and Sir Henry talked. It was professional, of course—who had been made post and so on. Lady Helen smiled and nodded and, bless her, ignored us.

So there I was, wishing with a sudden urgency that my wounds were real—not injuries but wounds! I wished I had led a forlorn hope and come back heroically wounded, wounded so severely that I must be nursed and by whom but this discovered angel? I desired with as much urgency as the other that I might have a uniform with which to dazzle her, or an order; and cursed inwardly the world that hangs ornaments on old men who no longer have a use for them! Yet I felt even in those first minutes that she was a girl of wit and understanding and not to be won by a
confection
of blue broadcloth and gold braid—oh, God, what have I said? She would not—

What did we talk about? I cannot now remember because our words meant little compared with the tides of feeling 
that swept through that strange drawing-room! At times I swear there was a living silence between us which was infinitely sweet. Like Lady Somerset we had become, I suppose, or I had become, by the power and influence of my feelings, a sensitive! I did really feel the very being of Marion beside me, a new thing in life, a new knowledge, means of it, awareness; and she I swear again was in the same way aware of me. The voices growled on in the
stateroom
but we were in a silver bubble of our own.

A bubble! I passed those blessed hours like a spendthrift heir who thinks that money grows on trees and he need do nothing but bid his man of business wave a wand to make guineas fall instead of leaves. How I squandered those two hours which should rather have been divided into one hundred and twenty minutes, seven thousand two hundred seconds, each second, each instant to have been valued, savoured—no, that is too gross a word—every instant should have been prized—precious is a good word and so is enchantment. Like some knight in an old tale Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, with his whole career to make, spent those hours asleep on his shield in the ruined chapel of love! Forgive a young man, a young fool, his ardours and ecstasies! I understand now that the world will only give ear to them in the mouth of genius.

So what do I remember? Nothing clearly of that magic time but only its ending when we were brought out of it by hearing Anderson growl something about “the confounded ball”.

“The ball—Miss Chumley, we are forgetting! There is to be a ball! A ball, do you hear? We shall dance the night away. You must promise me your hand for—oh, for what? For every dance of course, well if not, for some of them—most of them—for the longest dance—what is the longest dance? There will be a cotillion!
Yes!
And an allemande—shall we be allowed to dance the valse?” 

“I do not think so, Mr Talbot. Lady Somerset as a
devotee
of Lord Byron cannot possibly countenance a valse, can you, Helen?”