To the Ends of the Earth (62 page)

“For,” said he, smiling into my face, “if they say Time and Tide wait for no man, how much more tyrannical is this mysterious physiology!”

I withdrew, therefore, but was buttonholed by Mr Brocklebank who had a flutter about his lips and who for the first time since the doldrums had appeared without his coach cloak. He was carrying on a quavery conversation with Celia Brocklebank careless of who might hear. As far as I could make out he was imploring her to share the
couch so that they might die in each other’s arms
!

“No no, Wilmot, I cannot endure the thought—it is not congenial! Besides, you have not been there since Christmas when Mr Cumbershum lent you that salubrious book!”

Meanwhile a feeble voice was whimpering from Zenobia’s cabin—

“Wilmot!! Wilmot! I am dying!”

“So are we all—I beg you, Celia!”

Has it not been said that in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions the same curious phenomenon of exacerbated sexuality occurs? But whatever the explanation, it gave me a higher opinion of my dear Mrs Prettiman’s Roman stance. I spoke with Bowles, pulled the curls of Pike’s little girls, suggested to him that a drink would be a good
thing—was reminded by Mr Brocklebank there was none remaining, except, as he said, what he had obtained
under the counter
from Master Tommy Taylor. In fact,
disappointed
in his Celia he retired to the cabin to fortify himself with the bottle, abandoning Celia who showed a marked preference for my company quite suddenly, and I have no doubt that she was in train to find it
congenial
if I had—but Mrs Prettiman returned. I followed her. Mr Prettiman was a little propped up on pillows. He was still smiling with apparent cheerfulness.

“Edmund, we have a thing or two to settle. You will of course look after Letty.”

“Of course, sir.”

“It is impossible that I should survive in the state in which I find myself. It will be next to impossible for a man in full health. But I, with this leg—therefore, when the end is upon us you must get on deck, the two of you, wrapped in as much clothing as you can wear, and make your way to the boats.”

“No, Aloysius. Edmund may do so—must do so. He is young and we are not in any way his responsibility. I shall stay with you.”

“Now, Mrs Prettiman—I shall become testy!”

“You will not, sir. Edmund will go, not I. But I would like him to hear this, for I believe he stands in much need of an example—and you know, Edmund, I am a
governess
! So—now”—and here her voice sank both in pitch and volume and became warmer than I at least had ever heard it—“so now I must make a solemn declaration. In the short span of our married life I have never
disobeyed
you and would not have done so in the future had there been one, not because I am your wife but because of who and what you are! But we have no future, I think, and I shall stay with you here in this cabin. Goodbye, Edmund—”

“Goodbye, my boy. No woman—”

“I—”

My throat was choked. Somehow I got out of the cabin and closed the door behind me. As I did so the ship became upright, another and I guess contrary wave washed over the waist and burst into the lobby. I waded to the entrance, helped Bowles to his feet and saw him return silent and soaked to his cabin, suggested to the Pike children that it was all great
fun
and got myself into the waist.

“Charles! How is it?”

“I have not time, Edmund. But no one has ever seen a berg like this—like that!”

He nodded to the side, then pounded up to the quarterdeck. There was a little less fog—or rather it had seemed to retreat from us. We had perhaps a quarter of a mile—I should say a couple of cables of open water visible on all sides. Once more the ice was visible fitfully; and now in dim daylight looked harder, colder, more implacable. It seemed clear that we were moving parallel to the face of the cliff and at a great speed. The speed could not be due to our motion through the water but rather to our motion relative to the ice. If the fog cleared for a few moments we seemed to race by the white cliff, but as it thickened again so our speed seemed to slow to what was owing solely to the wind. There was, it was evident, a very fast current racing by the berg from south to north and taking us with it. The sea in fact was as savagely indifferent to us as the ice!

I turned to go up to the quarterdeck. Little Tommy Taylor came down it.

“How is the purser, Mr Taylor?”

“I couldn’t persuade him to leave the boat, sir. The captain says I will have to tell him he’s under arrest.”

Tommy went forrard and I continued to the
quarterdeck
. Mr Benét had the watch with young Willis. The
captain stood at the top of the ladder up to the poop, a hand on the rail at either side of the top. He was looking round constantly, at the fog, the glimpses of ice, the confused sea which resulted from the beating of the waves and their recoil from the cliff. As I reached the quarterdeck I heard thunderous explosions behind me where once more there was a cataclysmic fall of ice. Though it was veiled by the fog the noise of the fall was significantly louder.

“Well, Mr Benét, what do you think of Nature now?”

“We are privileged. How many people have seen anything like this?”

“Intolerable meiosis!”

“Understatement? Were you not some time ago the passenger who declared to all and sundry that he would not be anywhere else for a thousand pounds? Mr Willis, contrive to stand up straight and look useful even if you are not!”

“My declaration, Mr Benét, was made
pour encourager les autres
, as you would say.”

“And you yourself would
fain die a dry death
, as you would say? Hazleton, you idle bugger, you should turn a rope after you’ve cheesed it! Captain, sir!”

“Yes, Mr Benét, I see the ice. Mr Summers! Have the longboat ready to drop on the starboard beam.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

More pipes, more hurry.

“Have you noticed, Mr Benét—”

“Just a moment, Mr Talbot. Mr Summers! Willis—go after Mr Summers and tell him that Mr Talbot suggests filling the longboat with hammocks.”

“I did no such thing!”

The captain spoke behind us. It was the only time I ever heard Mr Benét receive even the shadow of a rebuke.

“It will keep some of them busy, Mr Benét, and is
appropriate
at this time. But you might inform the passengers in
general terms that they are still advised not to interfere in the running of the ship!”

Having delivered this relatively mild rebuke to his favourite, the captain retired to the taffrail as if he was embarrassed by his own words. Benét turned to me.

“You heard that, Mr Talbot?”

“I said nothing about hammocks! Nor do I know why the longboat is to be got ready unless it is to ensure the escape of the more valuable persons, in which case—”

“There are no valuable persons, Mr Talbot. We shall all die together. The longboat is to persuade people that something is being done. It is to be a fender between us and the ice—”

“Will that do any good?”

“I think not.”

Willis came back.

“Mr Summers says to thank Mr Talbot, sir.”

“You are looking green, my lad. Cheer up! When it comes, it will be quick.”

“Benét! The ice is nearer—look!”

“We have done what we can. Captain sir. Do we drop the boat?”

“Not yet.”

Suddenly the ice was there, close. I could look at nothing else. To my eyes the cliff seemed monstrously high. It was uniformly undercut along the base and the water near it was full of huge fragments which had fallen and which were the immediate danger. I heard the captain shout some Tarpaulin order and saw the longboat drop over the starboard side—saw the thick painter snub as the pull of the water came on the boat. The ice, now gleaming dully white and green, was behaving preposterously. We had swung even farther to the north—I suppose an unordered and involuntary movement made by the men at the helm—and if our heading had been anything to go by should have
been moving markedly away from the cliff. But it was evident even to my untutored eye that we were not doing so. For the effect of the earth’s rotation which is said to cause that perpetual current round the Antarctic Ocean should have moved the ice as much as it moved us. But for whatever reason, it was not doing so. We were feelingly approaching the ice as
Alcyone
had approached us, beam on or even quarter on. Nor could our sails account for our two movements—the one to the north, the other towards the east and the ice.

I make all this sound too coldly rational! How many times since those dreadful hours have I started up in my bed and
willed
a change in our remembered
circumstances
! But then, as I clung to the windward side of the vessel, I had no rational appreciation of what was
happening
, only the incomprehensible sight of it! How to explain the disorganized fury of the sea, the towers, pinnacles, the bursts of water that had replaced those steadily marching billows which had swung under and past us for so many days together? For now it seemed that those billows were flung back at us. Columns of green water and spray climbed the ice cliff and fell back from it. Wind against wind, wave against wave, fury feeding on itself—I tried to think of my parents, of my Belovéd Object, but it would not do. I was a present panic, an animal in the article of death. The ice was above us! Ice fell, leapt up monstrously from beneath the foam, and still we swept in towards that hideous, undercut and rotten wall. Some of our sails were slack and beating, some filled the wrong way round and yet we hurried towards and along the wall fast as horses might have drawn us. If there was anything regular about our situation it was in the explosive falls of ice from the walls of this mortal and impregnable city! Then I
recognized
that Nature—the Nature which Miss Chumley so rightly detested—had now finally gone mad. For hours we
had been thrust sideways towards the cliff of ice
downhill
, as Mr Benét had once said, and at a coaching speed. Now the ice, as if to demonstrate its own delirium, was
performing
the impossible. It was rotating round us. It appeared astern, then swung round past us and went by way of the bows where it had come from. It repeated the action, then drew in alongside to starboard. Among all the noises of that situation I heard the longboat crack like a nut. I do not know if the
coup de grâce
was given the boat by a floating block of ice or the cliff itself. There was a green road of smooth water close under the ice, only
interrupted
when the cliff above us spilled some incalculable weight. The blocks that had fallen into the road of green water were going with us at the same speed, crashing and crumbling where they jostled each other or the side of the cliff. A block fell and took a stuns’l off the outer edge of some sail on the mainmast and dropped, comfortably wrapped as it were, the stuns’l yard fluttering behind it like a feather. Another, the shape and more than the size of Lady Somerset’s fortepiano, came sideways forward of the mainmast and took the front half of Mr Jones’s boat with Mr Jones and Mr Tommy Taylor attached and shot with them through the larboard rail.

But we were now, it seemed, to be introduced even more intimately to the cliff, which arranged itself along our larboard side, careful, as it were, not to touch us.

We were, to use Tarpaulin once more, making a
sternboard
, or more intelligibly, we were going backwards faster than we had ever gone forwards! The cliff, dropping a few thousand tons of ice by our larboard bow, threw that off to starboard as a boy might thrust a model boat with his foot.

It was a crisis of helplessness beyond seamanship. My brain went. I saw a
mélange
of visions in the ice which swept past me—figures trapped in the ice, my father
among them. A cave opened with an eye of verdure at the other end of it.

The last spasm of our ordeal came upon us. The ice moved violently and disappeared before our eyes and we raced
downhill
! It seemed the final sinking, the end of everything.

Only the sinking did not come. We were, it appeared, upright in a windless sea to the east of which a clear white day had spread. Around us in the water, blocks of ice lay still.

I straightened up from my crouched position, unstuck my hands from the rail. Along the decks, people were beginning to move again, but slowly as if they could never be too cautious. We were, after all, turning very slowly in the water. The sails were rustling.

Someone forrard shouted a sentence and there were bellows and screams of laughter and, after that, silence again. I never found out what the joke was or who had made it.

To the west of us lay the yellow fog with here and there a dull gleam of ice in it, some increasing distance away,
courtesy
, it seemed, of that same circumpolar current which for so many days had been bringing us to the east.

People began to talk.

It will save trouble if I insert here part of a communication made to me by a member of my old college who wishes to remain anonymous. However, the reader is assured that my old and learned acquaintance is the final court of appeal in matters of hydrology and associated -ologies.

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.