To the Ends of the Earth (49 page)

“In future, my boy, avoid noble sentiments. They are like drawing a card blind. You may get anything from the joker to the—”

Nevertheless I am a rational man.

The day had been long. Sleep ought to have been easy. Yet I did not chuse to throw off my garments and get at once into the bunk. A naked man is defenceless. He
cannot
run naked out onto a moon-drenched deck. Not unless he is delirious. Well, thought I, I will do myself the kindness of going little by little. I lay down, fully dressed in my slops, on the coverlet of the bunk. I lay on my back. The eyebolt was inches from my face. I shut my eyes but was provoked by the slight intimations of light and shadow passing over them. I opened my eyes, therefore, and determining to ignore the eyebolt, focused my eyes on the white-painted deckhead. I found myself examining in detail the wounded underside of a deckbeam, a hole with a pointed thing in the bottom.

I turned over and lay on my face, but the roll of the ship and the occasional pitch made me lurch uncomfortably. I fumbled for the side of the bunk with one hand and at the side of the ship with the other. My fingers took hold. It was the eyebolt, of course. The hair of my head sprang erect. There was an instant in which I might have flung
myself from the bunk and rushed away to find Charles or someone, anyone warm and living who breathed and spoke! Yet in that fearful instant I made up my mind and stayed where I was, the fierceness of my clutch making my whole body tremble. Eyes shut, I stayed there, in the very position of the dying man, and was as cold as he.

The change was gradual. The petrifaction of fear diminished into unease, then into a greyness of consent. Thus it had been. Thus it was.

There was a moan from somewhere, from Prettiman in his bunk. I let go the eyebolt and turned over on my back. The wounded deckbeam had less to say to me. I shut my eyes.

I did not experience the passage from waking to
sleeping
. But it seems that at some point before the coming of the light I must have fallen into a kind of sleep or trance or place.

He was saying something. His voice was far away. A familiar voice, choked with sobbing. I could not place the voice but knew I must. Who in the name of God? I was in a place lit by a savage light which leapt and sank, again and again. The voice drew nearer.

“You could have saved us.”

The voice was my own voice. I was awake, the flame was leaping and sinking behind the glass of the lantern. I turned it out and lay back, waiting for the dawn.

When the dawn came I dressed thoughtfully enough. But life must go on and even the sadness of self-knowledge cannot come wholly between a man and his stomach!

The passenger saloon was deserted except for little Pike. He sat under the window, his arms folded on the table, his head on them. I thought he was drunk again but as I entered he looked up, smiled sleepily, then put his head down. So there was another cabin in which people found it difficult to be at ease! I got myself a mug of small ale from Bates—there was nothing else to have—and drank “
breakfast
” quite in the antique manner. I went back to my hutch and got into my oilskins and seaboots and was about to go into the waist but saw old Mr Brocklebank standing there in the shadow of the larboard main chains. He had usurped my place. I sat in my canvas chair then, all oilskinned as I was, and surveyed my few books on the shelf at the end of the bunk. I remembered Charles and his gift of the slops that I was wearing. I took down the
Iliad
, therefore, and read in book
zeta
the story of Glaucus and Diomede. They had exchanged armour recklessly, it seemed,
trading
bronze armour for gold. I could not decide whether my determination to see Charles promoted was gold or bronze—certainly his care of me, getting me bathed and changed as if he were my old nurse, was gold in the
circumstances
! I read on but soon found the words drifting apart. It had been a short and troubled night. I
remembered
that Charles had told me not to wear my oilskins except to keep myself dry so I put the book back and went out to the waist. Mr Brocklebank had gone. I stayed in the lee of the main chains to allow the wind to freshen me.

Mr Benét came briskly out of the lobby.

“Well, Mr Talbot, we get on!”

“This weather is still too lively to allow you to tamper—I should say to mend, the foremast?”

“For the time being. But the wind moderates. And
fortunately
the movement does not prevent Coombs from making charcoal.”

“Stay, sir. A moment. I have heard that in an
emergency
masts may be cut away.”

“You have been speaking to the first lieutenant!”

“Indeed I have, but he said nothing of that. It is my own idea—cut away the foremast and you save yourself the risk of mending the shoe! I do have occasional ideas, you know.”

“I am sure you do, sir. But if we cut away the foremast we should probably have to cut away the mizzenmast to balance things. Nor do masts fall precisely where you mean them to. Imagine the foremast going over the side, still tethered to the ship, and dragging her round so she broached to! We might be overset and swamped in
seconds
. Bravo, Mr Talbot, but no, sir. That will not do. The moment it is possible we shall crimp the shoe and draw it together. Bite your nails a watch or two longer.”

I did not like his tone but there seemed nothing I could do about that. However, we did have interests in common—

Benét was moving away. I hastened after him.

“I had meant to ask you, sir, to explain a certain episode in which you and Lady Somerset and Miss Chumley—”

“Later, Mr Talbot. Oh, this weather! It makes a man want to sing!”

He ran swiftly along the deck and vanished into the fo’castle between one roll and the next. Charles emerged from the lobby. A petty officer and two seamen came with him. He paused when he saw me.

“Well, Edmund?”

“A bad night, I am afraid.”

“There is little colour in your face. Are you feeling the motion?”

“No. I have had a bad night, that is all.”

“You could return to the wardroom.”

I felt myself flushing, for it was evident that he
understood
something of my “bad night”.

“And be laughed at? No.”

“In discomfort and danger people are glad of
something
to laugh at.”

“So we are still in danger?”

He turned to the petty officer and gave him an order. The man knuckled his forehead and the little party
cantered
—doubled, I suppose I should say—along the deck to the fo’castle.

“Yes, Edmund. We are in the same danger as before.”

“At least the weather is improving.”

“My dear fellow! This is a pause and will give Benét time to tamper with the foremast. I do not like the look of the weather. There is something big up there which will search us out. Well, I must get on.”

“Let me come with you.”

“No no. You cannot. My rounds are not for you.”

He saluted in the naval manner and went forward along the deck. The lifelines were not so much bouncing now as vibrating gently. Charles ignored them.

“Mr Talbot.”

I turned. Miss Granham, in slops and seaboots too big for her, was standing in the entry to the lobby.

“Good morning, ma’am. What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to call you to Mr Prettiman. Is the time
convenient
?”

“To visit him? Of course, ma’am, whenever you wish.”

She opened his door a crack, looked in, then shut it again.

“He has fallen asleep again. It is the paregoric. Perhaps—”

She seemed doubtful. But I could see no reason for delay.

“May I not go in and wait?”

“If you wish.”

I entered Prettiman’s cabin and pulled the door to behind me. The cabin was like all the others, a bunk, a shelf for books, a canvas washbowl with a small mirror over it and, at the other end, a writing flap with the usual accoutrements. There was a bucket under the washbowl and a canvas chair before the writing flap. Mr Prettiman had signalled his eccentricity by sleeping the wrong way round—his head was towards the stern, his feet towards the bow. His head was, in consequence, just above the bucket, which may have been his original intention in sleeping that way round. Certainly I had vivid and
miserable
memories of our first weeks in the ship and the nausea which had overcome me and the other passengers.

Prettiman was so deeply asleep that it was hard to believe he had been awake that morning. The air was thick, as must be the air of all sickrooms, I suppose, since fresh air is so deleterious to a troubled body. Though it was not to be thought that our ladies, accustomed as they must be to the treatment of childish ailments, would leave the sufferer unwashed, there was a distinct odour
emanating
from the man which made a close approach to him distasteful. I realized with a resigned determination that I was
in for
an unpleasant enough experience. However, I daresay that the hardly describable events of the night had made me a little more aware of my offhand ability to spread destruction! I sat down cautiously, therefore, with a vague feeling that as long as he slept I was doing what Miss Granham required by being present. The odour from his body strove with another which I had no difficulty in
identifying
as paregoric, or laudanum. No wonder he slept.
The bedclothes were pulled up to his neck. His bald head was dinted into a pillow far softer than the one which had been provided for me. His face above the tawny beard and scanty fringe of hair was very pale. It was a face I had seen often enough comically reddened by passionate anger. This mask of flesh and bone on which his emotions were so often played out for all to see was irregular enough. The tilted nose was as far from his long upper lip as that of a stage Irishman, a
Paddy.
His mouth was wide and firm, so that the lines of determination as well as anger were engraved there. Sickness had wasted his flesh and removed a great deal of the comedy. Those eyes which could glare in all the madness of social bigotry were veiled by dark lids and sunk deep under the frantic eyebrows. It was perhaps possible to laugh at the waking man. But this effigy, stretched as on the slab of a tomb, had nothing of the laughable. Where was ludicrous Prettiman, opinionated, sometimes frantic, indignant beside his unlikely fiancée? But she had suffered a like sea change without the trouble of a fall, a severe spinster, now seen to be handsome, dignified and sensible—and feminine! Why, the man
himself
—there came a ninth wave in our diminishing weather, for the cabin lurched. That same cry which I had heard when I was awake in the cabin off the wardroom—that cry which had drawn me forth—the anguish—woe—I sprang to my feet. It was not to be borne. I saw myself condemned to sit in this stink and be exacerbated time after time as the man woke and that cry burst out! I seized the door handle—

“Who is it?”

That was a feeble voice behind me. I turned.

“It is Edmund Talbot.”

The man was sinking down in stupor again. I was
exasperated
. And I had said I would wait. Yet only that night I had known, found out what I bore in my hands! I sank
down into the canvas chair again. The bedclothing was massed about his middle and hiding the lines of his body there. Lower down, his legs and feet lifted the blankets. The odour of paregoric was more perceptible since his cry. The spirit which had half-awakened in the tormented body had sunk away again into the depths. The eyelids fluttered and were still. The mouth fell open, but this time a sigh was all the sound he made.

I leaned back and surveyed him as he lay in the bunk. Under their lids his eyes moved rapidly from side to side. His breath came unevenly, he panted. I thought his eyes would open but they did not. He muttered in his sleep or swoon. The words dragged out.

“—John Laity for the term of his natural life. Hamilton Moulting Baronet as colonel light dragoons emoluments from clothing​—expenses of the returning officer—​Mungo FitzHenry master in Chancery for life four
thousand
and six pounds—”

Good God—it was my cousin and that superb
plum
! What the devil did this man mean by it? I leapt to my feet. I seized the door handle—and felt it turn from the
outside
. Miss Granham looked in. She whispered:

“Mr Talbot? Not yet awake?”

“No.”

That same feeble voice again.

“Letitia? Is that you?”

“It is Mr Talbot come to see you, Aloysius.”

“William Collier fourteen years for illegal assembly—”

“It is I, Mr Prettiman, Edmund Talbot. I am told you wish to see me. Well, I am here and waiting.”

Behind me Miss Granham closed the door.

“Letitia?”

“Miss Granham has stepped outside. She supposed you wanted to speak to me, though what I have done to deserve such an unexpected honour—”

He was turning his head restlessly and gritting his teeth.

“I am not able to sit up.”

“Do not incommode yourself. I am able to stand here and you are able to see me.”

“Sit down, boy. Sit down!”

The man intended an order, there was no doubt about that. I wish I could say that I sat to humour a sick man but the truth is my body sat itself down before I was aware of what was happening! A slight movement of the cabin made him grit his teeth again and audibly. His face cleared little by little. I spoke abruptly, annoyed by my involuntary obedience.

“As I said. I am waiting to hear what you want.”

“You are aware that Miss Granham and I—”

He was silent again. I did not know whether he was interrupted by some pain or whether he felt a natural embarrassment at raising the subject with a stranger. I thought it best to help the sick man where I could,
otherwise
this irritating interview would be more and more prolonged.

“I am aware as everyone else in the ship is that the lady has consented to make you the happiest of men. I have already felicitated the lady, I believe. Permit me to congratulate—”

“Don’t smother the thing in nonsense!”

“I beg your pardon, sir!”

“She has agreed to marry me.”

“That is what I said!”

“
Now, I mean
. Where are your wits?”

“We have no clergymen!”

“Captain Anderson will perform the ceremony. Do you know nothing?”

I was silent. Clearly the shortest way to the end was to listen and not interrupt. Mr Prettiman passed his tongue over his lips, then smacked them.

“Would you like a drink? This water—”

Now he turned his head and looked straight at me,
examining
my face as I had examined his. A trace of a smile,
wintry
enough, deepened the creases round his mouth and eyes.

“Unfair, amn’t I?”

I grinned, however ruefully, at this sudden turn round.

“You’re having a devilish bad time, that’s what it is. Anyone—perhaps when the weather is better you could get out—”

“I am dying.”

“But, Mr Prettiman! A fracture—”

He shouted aloud.

“Will you abstain from this foolish habit of
contradiction
? When I say I am dying I mean I am dying and I am going to die!”

The end of this shouted exordium was confused by another cry from the depth of his agony, which I am
persuaded
that time he inflicted on himself by some
forbidden
movement. The cry was not only the expression of despairing anguish but of furious resentment.

“Mr Prettiman, I beg of you!”

Once again he lay silent, but perspiration trickled down his face. Behind me the door opened and Miss Granham looked in again. She stepped over the sill, reached under his pillow, took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. A smile returned to it. In a far softer voice than he had used to me he murmured, “Thank you, thank you.”

As Miss Granham was withdrawing he spoke again.

“Letty, there is no need for you to stand on guard. I am well enough and the dose still gives me some relief. Please return to your cabin and try to sleep. I am sure you need to. It frets me to think of you keeping yourself awake for my sake.”

She glanced at me, then smiled at him, nodded and closed the door behind her.

“Mr Talbot, I wish you to be a witness.”

“I?”

“You and Oldmeadow. To the ceremony—the marriage.”

“That is ridiculous! We have no official standing in the ship! Charles Summers, on the other hand, or Mr Cumbershum—I will give the bride away if you wish or—why anything!”