To the Ends of the Earth (57 page)

“And then? Then? You are silent, sir! That was all? That was all, Mr Benét?”

“Once again you are not amiable, Mr Talbot. This is the second time, like your jeering use of my name!”

“A plain answer, if you please, to a plain question!”

“That was ‘all’. Though to a man of any sensibility—”

“Explain why she took her clothes off. Explain that!”

“Lady Somerset took nothing off!”

“‘Since thou didst doff thy woman’s weeds’!”

There was an explosion of water. Spray drenched us. Benét dashed it from his face.

“I see it all. The coarseness of your mind has deceived you. The lady did indeed ‘doff’ her ‘woman’s weeds’—”

“Miss Granham! Mrs Prettiman!”

“Who else? The lines are unpolished as yet.”

“You are writing poetry to Mrs Prettiman!”

“Can you think of a worthier aim? She is all that the ages have looked forward to!”

“You wish to kiss her hand, sir, I have no doubt she would oblige. She has, after all, obliged gentlemen before—Mr Prettiman, her husband—but what has that word to do with poetry? He is in his bunk and cannot get out of it. I have no doubt that if you tapped on her door and asked nicely you might find yourself kissing her hand inside and out for a full watch by the sandglass!”

“You are nauseous.”

I must have snarled.

“I believe I am, sir. But at least I do not drool round the oceans dropping kisses in the palms of women old enough to be my mother!”

That appeared to sting. He heaved himself away from the mast and stood rocking.

“You had best stick to schoolgirls, Mr Talbot.”

“I resent the plural! For me there is only one lady!”

“You are loveless, Mr Talbot. It is your main defect.”

“I loveless? I am saying ‘ha ha’, sir! Do you hear me?”

“You are not yourself. We will continue this
conversation
when you are sober. I bid you good day.”

He vanished with what I might call an assisted celerity down the stairs to the wardroom, passing Mr Smiles as he did so. I shouted childishly after him.

“Mr Smiles, can you hear me? We are in love with our mothers!”

Mr Smiles came past me with a deft tread, neither
looking
at me nor speaking to me. He might have been a ghost with an appointment somewhere else.

I went to my cabin. Time, time itself was unendurable. I climbed into my oilskins and went out to stand on the deck. Immediately a wave lifted me up into the main chains and would have left me there had I not detached myself. It cooled my senseless rage. I stood holding on while the ocean performed. The crests of waves went past us, it seemed to me, at more than head height. Sometimes we bowed sideways into them so that the waist flooded deep, sometimes we leaned away and there was a gulf in which a solitary bird was suspended over darkness between hills of foaming green. Then horizontal rain and mist would blot out even the bird, and water would tumble down from the quarterdeck as from the guttering of a cathedral.

It cooled and calmed me. The ropes that bound us together and kept us from drowning were there before my eyes as a reminder of how and where we stood. I rebuked myself for my anger and for showing so much of my fear. It was not what I had expected of myself. I went to my cabin and at long last fell asleep.

What woke me from a dream of cliffs and slopes was a shattering blow. I was on the deck by my bunk from which I had fallen or been thrown, and as I scrabbled to get up, my canvas chair tipped over on me so that we went sliding together to thump the bulkhead beyond my writing flap. I got to my feet somehow and the angle at which my lantern with its loaded base now stood frightened me into a moment or two of near-immobility. I could only interpret the angle as information we were now sliding backwards—making a sternboard!—into the sea and should vanish there. My feet skidded from me and I was hanging from the bunk, the idiot lantern projecting above me as if the laws of Mr Benét’s Nature had been suspended. From that moment, I believe, I did not know quite what I was doing. I had some idea that the ship was under water already and that at any moment all the orifices would start to squirt. Confused with this was the thought that it was now the middle watch, I was late for it and Charles without a midshipman. Nor, as I gathered my wits together, did things get any better, for it was plain that we were in some emergency. There were noises. The Pike children were screaming needle-sharp and so was another female—Celia Brocklebank probably. Men were shouting. There were other noises too, booming and banging of sails, batter of blocks—somewhere glass shattered and cascaded. I got out into the lobby and found myself hanging from the safety rail by both hands—literally hanging from it as though the ship had stood on its head. I took one hand off the rail and immediately a sudden tug tore my other hand from it. I went tumbling the length of the lobby head over heels and
fetched up with a dizzying thud against the forrard
bulkhead
. Some force pinned me there for a while, so that I could see Oldmeadow fighting—and not succeeding—to get out of the passenger saloon. Then the pressure
slackened
a little bit and I used an interim to scramble into the waist and hang in my usual place—the larboard shrouds—as if for comfort in the familiar. But nothing was the same and what I could see held no comfort for me. Someone was cursing near me but I could not see who it was. Such sails as we had now glimmered into view as my eyes became accustomed to the dim light. It was that unearthly storm light again, which served not so much to light up the ship as illuminate what looked like solid walls of cloud
surrounding
us on every side and reaching up to a space in which stars swam erratically all together. The glimmering sails were empty! Below them the world of water made no sense, for there were dimly descriable mountains ahead and astern of us—black mountains. Then, in the first few moments of my gaze, the one astern changed shape, sank down and perhaps vanished. I say “perhaps”, for I did not see it go! As the mountain sank away I felt a stronger and stronger pull on my limbs, so that once more I seemed to be hanging, this time from the shrouds. The whole length of the waist sloped away from me under another mountain which had grown up before the bows—grown up and bid fair to fall on us. The tops’ls filled with loud bangs and the main course followed suit with explosions like cannon shot. We were lifted to the top of the world. I made a run for the stairs and got there, clinging to the rail. While the ship was upright I reached the top of the stairs and thrust my head above the level of the deck. I could see no one!

Was that the most terrifying moment of my life? No—there were others to come. But this, which might have been the prime contender, was muted and qualified by my sheer inability to believe in it! The quarterdeck deserted—oh,
God, the wheel! I scrambled back down the stair which was suddenly flat and hauled myself—uphill? sideways?—into the steering space.

“Edmund! Oh, thank God! Help me!”

The need was plain enough. I trod on the body of a man, dead or unconscious. Charles hung from the starboard side of the wheel, bearing down on it.

“Starboard!”

That was the beginning of a period when I had no time to be frightened. For what was in fact minutes but seemed timeless, I put such strength as I had to aid and increase the efforts that Charles made to handle the wheel in that sea by himself. I did help. I felt the wheel move under my applications and often what Charles himself could only begin I helped him carry through to its conclusion. The beginning of a movement of the wheel is easy enough, the whipstaff sees to that! But then after your strength has been put into flexing it, there is always a moment at which
nothing
, it seems, but sheer blind determination to defeat some invisible monster will allow one’s muscles to carry the thing through. I do not know how often the two of us moved the wheel. The movements were gross, for the ship was as near as nothing still since the puffs of air that filled her sails on the crests of these mountains were enough to give us only the merest token of steerage way. Presently Charles ceased to give me orders, for it was obvious that I could follow what he wanted without words. The
requirements
of the wheel spoke to me in their own language.

“All right, sir.”

It was a seaman. There were two—taking the wheel from us. Someone was on his knees and shaking the unconscious body on which I had stepped. The captain was there in the waist. There was blood on his face and a pistol in his hand. He was hatless, staring up at the sails.

“Midships!”

And then in a calm voice:

“I have her, Mr Summers.”

I crawled away from the wheel to the stairs. Mr Summers joined me on hands and knees.

“I was not called for the middle!”

He spoke exhaustedly.

“It is not the middle. It is the morning watch. I cannot talk.”

“What in the name of God—”

He shook his head. I fell silent, glad of a rail to hold on to.

“Are you all right, Charles?”

He nodded. The sense of usefulness, of being able to do more than cower in my bunk, was strong upon me.

“I will see what is to be done. There may be—”

I made my way up to the quarterdeck. The captain and Lieutenant Cumbershum stood by the forrard rail. I worked along it and shouted unnecessarily at Cumbershum.

“Can I help?”

His snarled answer was still in the air when some force tore me from the rail, held me suspended in a moment of positive flight.

“Stay out of trouble!”

I fell
on
rather than against the stairs up to the poop. I crawled up and entwined myself in the rails at this loftiest part of the hull. There was a faint wind, but just enough to fill the sails when it had the opportunity. For the rest, the sight was enough to send a man scuttling down to the bilges so as not to see the end which was coming upon him. Those waves which had been hidden or even beaten down by the smother of the storm had now come forth. The dying wind had allowed them to form in their ranges. I saw that our world was limited to three waves, three ranges, one astern of us, one ahead, one supporting us for the moment between them. Then, as our stern sank,
dimension and direction fell into confusion. The bows towered above us and then fell until we seemed to hang above them. The sight was unbearable and I shut my eyes. I became therefore, as they say in books, “all ears”. As the stern sank under me I heard the successive flap and clatter as one course of sails after the other lost the wind. The thunder as of great guns was our sails filling as we were lifted up again into the faintest of airs—bows first, stern first? The con must take such movements into account, for they might make the rudder work in reverse, a
contingency
for which the men at the wheel would not be able to allow. Yet a small mistake in these vast seas would allow the ship to broach to, be overset and sunk—This then was why an officer must stand, hour after hour, exercising his judgement and minute by minute hazarding us all on it!

I opened my eyes and found it just possible to keep them open. The faintest trace of wind breathed on my cheek. We were, I saw, on a crest, though in the darkness behind my eyelids I had thought us in a trough. Now we slid back and it seemed a gulf opened under the stern—there was no light in that abyss towards which we sped and I
clenched
my eyes shut as that blackness of water moved the ship on to an even keel, then tilted her, pitched her the other way until she was standing on her bowsprit.

At last I got my eyes open once more. The snail-trail of our oil glistened astern of us over one mountain range which was all that could be seen there even when we were on the crest of the next. These ranges made no spray, had no foam on them. They were a welter of black flint.

Time and again.

There were gleams and glitters now and then, either moon on water or some curious quality of the water itself.

Time and again.

There was a noise to be detected. It was not a ship noise, sail noise, wind noise. It was a
thump
, then a prolonged but
diminishing roar to follow. I could fit the noise to nothing in my experience for all the time we had spent, all those months with the limited repertoire of the sights and sounds of water—

Of course! It was solidity! It was one of those horrible ranges striking rock! I was on my feet, my mouth open to shout—but my seaboots shot from under me and in a moment I had skidded the short length of the poop and crashed into the after rail under the larboard lantern! My mouth had been open to shout something or scream, for the inference of solidity in all this water was very terrible, but the breath had all been knocked out of me. I do not know how near I came to breaking the rail and ending my career hopelessly in a streak of oily water, but at least the upright I struck was not rotten whatever was to be said of the rest of the ship. I scuttled back to my previous place as if that were safer. This was panic which now knocked out of me all the honour and heroics together with my breath.

I stared round me. We were rising at another range—they must have been a quarter of a mile apart—and saw nothing but black, horrible flint with a sullen dawn sky over it, dully shining flint, liquid flint—how to convey the sheer horror of
size
? For after all, the three moving
mountains
among which we were now living were nothing but ripples—yet magnified, multiplied in size past the huge, the colossal, to the point where they were overwhelmingly monstrous! They were a new dimension in the nature of water. This nature did seem to allow us to live—just; was not inimical, would not, so to say, go out of its way to harm us. For a mad moment I felt that could I but lay my ear close to the glistening, mobile blackness I should be able to hear into its very being, hear, it may be, the
fricative
movement of one particle against another. But then I remembered how we were literally tied together by the undergirdings and my soul became nothing but terror.
For I heard that same sudden
thump
, then grumbling diminution from somewhere over the larger horizon—that one which a man might see if he dared to climb the mast—a consideration which made me sick to think of—say then a horizon visible to some giant here who was made to the same measure as our watery ranges. Land, then, was within earshot?

The dawn was clouding over. Light lifted off the earth so that the sea itself collected blackness wherever there was allowed a temporary hollow. I will try to find the words which will describe what happened at this point of suspension between day and night. We were poised on one range when a new thing began to happen to the range which was pursuing us. I cannot tell even now what the cause was. We were not in shallow water, that is certain. Everywhere about us and for many hundreds of miles—perhaps thousands—the bottom, the solid globe was miles away down there under the majesty of the liquid element. Was there perhaps some confusion or even contrariety in that current with its endlessly marching billows, moving from one age to another round the bottom of the world? Whatever it was, the range pursuing us began to steepen and sharpen. Except for the trivial notch in which our oil lay, the whole wave—I call it “wave” having no better word—stood sheer. For a mile, it may be, on either hand it stood ready, then curved slowly and fell! I heard the hiss of the waters in the air even as they descended and then the strike of water on water, acres, miles of it, with a noise which went beyond noise. For that fall was a feeling, a stab in either ear, after which I could hear nothing. But I had my eyes still. At the moment of fall, as if the invisible air was a solid thing, a line of foam and spray flicked away across the sea. It
was
air, it was the air displaced by the fall of the mountain and thrust in every direction with the speed of a musket ball. But now on either hand the sea
went mad, foaming past us higher than the waist, higher than the rail of the quarterdeck, the rail of the fo’castle. The poop, with my arms wound in the rail, was all that stood above the water. But then, as if the oil had slowed it, the water which had lain in our notch of safety, though it did not foam, stood up and washed clear over the poop as well. I suppose it was a moment at which a seabird gliding over these sunless gulfs would have seen nothing but foam and three masts projecting. I stared forward as soon as the water left me and saw our ship begin to labour up, water pouring off the fo’castle before the waist had reappeared. Two more sails were in tatters. Was it that fearsome gust of air?

To remain alone was no longer possible. I moved and slipped. It was a new hazard and a ridiculous one. For all Charles’s care, his hanging of the bags of oil under the stern rather than the bows, our oil trail had come aboard at last. I crept to the ladder along the rail, or crawled rather, for most of the way I slipped and slid on my knees. High above me the sails “spoke”.

Captain Anderson had the con. He stood just aft of the wheel. Cumbershum lolled by the starboard rail, one arm hooked through it, his legs stretched along the deck. He looked across at the captain. He was speaking, for I could see his lips move. It was only then that I understood I had been literally deafened by the fall of the wave. I stayed in the shelter of the poop until little by little my hearing came back to me. Forrard I could see Mr Benét had men
working
already in the rigging among torn sails, though I did not think there was anything to be done. Had we not
suffered
a mortal blow? I did, I suppose, credit our ship with feelings and supposed that at any moment she might decide to give up this unequal struggle with an ocean never intended for ships—and particularly not for a
superannuated
hulk rendering like an old boot.