First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (7 page)

By three o’clock, the river was so wide that only the brightest shore lights shining feebly through the fog testified that we were still within its banks. The greyness tired me, so I lay on my bunk and must have napped a little. Around six o’clock, I woke and could tell by the ship’s motion that something was different. All I could see through the porthole was pitch darkness. But I guessed from the way the hull was heaving and straining that the
Cumnock
had left the sheltered passage of the river. We were at sea.

I was starving, and wondering if I’d ever eat again, when there was a rap at my cabin door and a gruff shout:

“Dinner’s ready!”

My first visit to the mess hall was an experience I won’t forget. Not only because I could feel the rolling motion of the ship, by now, in the pit of my belly; nor because I sat at
a table with the other passenger: an elderly woman who seemed preoccupied and who sometimes mumbled to herself in a language I didn’t know, and who was dressed in an ankle-length green dress with a pattern of wilted yellow flowers; nor because I saw the crew members assembled at a long table at the far end of the mess: grizzled, elderly men who seemed very unfriendly, except for the bearded man who served the meal; nor because of the meal itself: a stewed beef that gave off a sweet smell unlike any stew made in Stroven.

These things were memorable enough in their way. But there was something else.

We’d all begun eating (in my case, pretending to eat; I picked out a few potatoes, but my hunger wasn’t as strong as my suspicion of that stew) when the sliding door of the mess-room opened. At first I couldn’t see whoever had opened it, for he stopped to talk to someone in the passageway and only his right foot on the raised entranceway was visible. The cuff of the trousers rose a few inches above a black shoe, showing a dark sock with a pattern of intertwined yellow snakes round an anchor. The man finished his conversation and came into the mess hall. He was a heavy, fair-haired man. He wore a uniform and had a hat tucked under his arm.

He slid the door shut behind him and without looking around went to a little table in the corner. The bearded sailor who’d served our meals got up from the long table and went over to him.

“Good evening, Captain Stillar. Now, how would you like something to whet your thirst?”

In this way I discovered that the man who was the mysterious painter of women in the Hochmagandie Hotel was also the Captain of the
Cumnock
.

The ship was steaming towards the tropics, but those first days of the voyage were anything but tropical. The skies were leaden, the winds seemed to have northern ice in them, the seas were swollen and flecked with grey crests. There was rain, rain, rain. And I was sick, sick, sick. I kept to my cabin for two days, eating nothing at all. My stomach had begun to heave during that first night at sea, and even though I emptied it totally of the few gobbets of potatoes I’d eaten, I didn’t feel at all well unless I lay flat on my back.

Lying there, a little feverish, I thought what a strange man the Captain of the ship must be. And I thought about how strange it was to be on such a voyage: how time passed, hour followed hour, day followed day, but the ship might easily have been anchored just out of sight of the land, its movement only an illusion caused by the sea’s motion. All of us on the
Cumnock
were like the inhabitants of a little town, except that our roots were in water. But I had learnt enough to wonder whether even towns like Stroven, firmly rooted in earth, were any more stable than this ship afloat on an endless ocean.

B
Y THE MORNING
of the third day at sea, I was feeling a little better, but my stomach was still too queasy for me to get up. At nine o’clock, there was a knock at my door. The sailor who’d served the meals in the mess hall looked in. His eyebrows were very bushy, and his long grey hair was wild.

“Good morning,” he said. “I’m Harry Greene, at your service. I’ve given you a day’s rest. Now let’s have a look at you.” He was wearing a white apron and carrying a small tray covered with a cloth. He put the tray down and felt my forehead.

“God’s oars!” he said, lowering his eyebrows fiercely. His strange oath made me afraid of him. “Now then,” he said. “We’ll have to do something about that fever.”

As he was giving me some pills from the tray, I couldn’t help noticing on his right forearm a multicoloured tattoo of an anchor with the words
Anchora Spei
under it. He saw me looking and told me he’d had it done just before we left port, and that the words were Latin and meant “The Anchor of Hope.” He said he’d had it copied from an old book he’d brought with him. The more he talked, the less fierce he seemed. He stayed for an hour.

That was the first of many hours I spent with Harry Greene, steward and medic of the SS
Cumnock
. Even after I was well, he’d drop by once or twice a day to talk. He seemed to have all the time in the world. He’d tell me about his other voyages or about books he was reading.

I enjoyed listening to him, though at first I was cautious. I’d learnt from my mother that words weren’t trustworthy. She treated them as though they were the remnants of something that might once have made sense but now were generally misleading and to be avoided.

Harry Greene, on the other hand, loved talking. His favourite time for visiting me was in the evenings after his work in the galley was done. He’d bring along his big cup of grog and sip while he talked.

I can’t be sure now on which days we talked about particular things. All the days on that long voyage have blended together in my mind. But I do remember many of the things he said, they made such an impression on me.

Harry Greene grew up in Ireland; traces of the accent were in his voice still, though he’d been at sea for thirty-five years. He’d begun his career as a cabin boy at a time when many of the ships still relied on sail, either totally or as an auxiliary to their engines.

“Back then, ’twas a different life altogether,” he said. “Sailors had to depend on each other. Believe me, my boy, there’s no better way of getting to know yourself, or how much you can trust another man, than to be stuck out on a yardarm with him during a gale.”

He said this one night, the rummy smell from his cup all through my cabin, as he was telling me about the very first voyage he made. It was an expedition to Patagonia, at the tip of South America, in search of the last of the dinosaurs.

“Our ship was the
Mingulay
, as well found a little ship as ever I sailed on. We landed on the Patagonian coast and unloaded the equipment for the expedition. But even on shore, we didn’t stop being sailors. We used to sit around the campfire at night and tell stories, just the way we did in the fo’c’sle.

“One story I’ll never forget was told by the Engineer. ’Twas a rainy night and the fire was blazing and bats were flitting in and out of the flames.

“This Engineer was a man from one of the northern islands. He had eyes that were milky blue.

“He said when he was a boy, a doctor and his wife and their four children came to live on the island. This doctor eventually murdered his wife, no one knew why. ’Twas most strange how he got rid of her body. He cut it up in pieces and buried parts of her in the bellies of the four children. He even buried her eyes and ears in the bellies of the family pets.”

Harry Greene looked at me from under the battlements of his eyebrows.

“God’s oars!” he said. “’Twas a scary story for a young lad like me to hear in that wild place. The other sailors just laughed. They said ’twas just a joke. But right then, the Engineer stood up in the firelight and pulled his shirt open. And what do you know? We could all see a big ragged scar across his belly. ’Twas himself was one of the children he’d been talking about.”

The bushy eyebrows arched again.

“Yes, I heard that story on our first night ashore. I’ll never forget the rain, and the bats skimming in and out of the firelight. And the scar on that man’s belly.”

He sighed and took a sip from his mug.

“Patagonia was the kind of godforsaken place you might have expected to find dinosaurs in. But we never found a trace of them. Later on, somebody wrote a history of that expedition. ’Twas all about the fact that we didn’t find dinosaurs but there was no mention of the Engineer’s story in the entire book. If you ask me, that’s the problem with a lot of history books—they miss the things that really matter in your life.”

He smiled at me in his fierce way.

“Now Andy, I suppose you think this is all nostalgia, eh? Sure now, I myself can’t bear listening to old men looking back on the good old days and inventing feelings they never had at the time.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Well, I’m not making it up,” he said. “I really did love that first voyage. Every day of it was exciting.”

I believed him and I envied him.

H
ARRY
G
REENE OFTEN
spoke about books. One day he took me down to his cabin just below the main deck near the crew’s lounge.

He had to lean against the door to get it open, for the floor of his cabin was littered with books. They looked as though they’d once been in neat piles, but the ship’s motion had toppled them; they stirred and shifted as we made our way through them, stepping in the shallower parts. The walls of his cabin had been fitted with bookshelves with little ridges in front; books were jammed into them, too. Books lay on the bunk and books protruded from under it. The washroom was open and I could see books on the floor and on the sink.

On the washroom door, there was a picture frame, but it didn’t have a picture in it—just some words. I thought maybe it was an old saying:

Harry saw me looking at it.

“’Twas said by the devil himself in an old poem.” His eyebrows were fierce. “But devil or no devil—I think it makes a lot of sense.”

I didn’t know what the words meant, or what he meant, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I just looked around, marvelling at the number of books he had.

“’Tis my hobby,” he said. “You remember I was telling you about that Patagonian expedition? Well, the ship’s carpenter on that voyage was a great reader. ’Twas he who put the idea into my head. He said there’s so much time on voyages
when nothing happens, they’re ideal for a man with a thirst for books.”

So Harry Greene took up reading and had been voyaging and reading, and reading and voyaging, ever since.

“Sure there’s no end to it,” he said. “I soon found that out. There’s an ocean of books out there. You can go from port to port without ever dropping anchor in the same berth.”

His favourite pastime on shore leaves was prowling the bookstores. He’d accumulate boxloads upon boxloads of books, often on a particular subject for study on his next voyage.

“Now take this trip,” he said. “I thought I’d have a try at some old books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” He pointed to the tattoo on his arm. “I got this from a picture at the front of one of them—
The Faerie Queene
, ’tis called. I haven’t read much of it, ’tis such a long book, and I don’t think I’ll be able to stomach much more now that I’ve got the hang of it. ’Tis mainly about damsels in distress and knights in armour. The damsels generally turn out to be smarter than the knights who’re supposed to save them.”

He picked up a thick book lying on the floor near his bunk.

“Have a look at this,” he said, “
The Anatomy of Melancholy
. The man who wrote this spent his whole life collecting books. He was definitely a bit on the strange side. I’ll tell you why: he said he knew exactly the day he was going to die, and he told everybody about it for more than twenty years. He said ’twould be on the twenty-fifth of January, sixteen-forty.

“Well, sixteen-forty arrived, and the twenty-fifth of January came. And what do you know? Not only did he not feel sick, he felt even healthier than usual. He waited all
day, just in case. ’Twas no good. So, just before midnight, he went to his room and tied a rope with a noose in it round the rafter. He stood on a chair with a pile of books on it. He put the noose round his neck and kicked the books out from under himself. It didn’t take him long to choke.”

Harry was smiling ferociously.

“God’s boat!” he said. “Now, anybody could forecast their death by that method, couldn’t they, Andy?”

I didn’t know what to say. I was astonished that authors could be so strange. I’d always assumed they must be the wisest of human beings.

Harry put the book he’d been holding into my hands: an old volume with leather covers. The pages were full of tiny print, and the spelling was strange. A lot of the words seemed to be written in a foreign language.

“What’s melancholy?” I asked.

“Melancholy?” he said. “’Tis a kind of sadness about life. According to this book, women are the main cause of it for men. When you’re older, you’ll understand. The author has quotations from all over the place to back his theory up.”

This got Harry going again on the topic of reading.

“Do you know, Andy, at the time that book was written, there were still people alive who’d read every single book that was in print?” he said. “Yes—everything, on every subject. They were experts in biology, mathematics, botany, astronomy, medicine, astrology, geography—anything you could name. They spent almost every waking minute of their lives reading. Some of them believed that if they studied everything, they’d find the secret of life, whatever that might be.”

He reached over for a book on the shelf over his bunk. It was a thick, worn volume. “Now, take a look at this,” he
said. “
Mundus Mathematicus
by Johannes Morologus. He’s what they call a numerologist. Among other things he believed there’s a system of numbers and mathematical symbols at the back of everything that exists. According to him, if you understand numbers and the combinations of numbers, you can understand everything about life. You can even find true love by using the proper calculations.” Harry shook his head fiercely. “That’s the kind of thing wise men studied back then. I got this book two voyages back, and I’ve been through it twice, trying to figure it out. It makes me wish I’d paid more attention to mathematics when I was a boy at school.”