First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (8 page)

I was only half listening, for I was still holding
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, leafing through it, trying to find some parts of it I could make sense of.

“This looks so hard,” I said.

Harry glanced towards the door as though to make sure no one else was listening.

“Well now,” he said, in a soft voice, “I wouldn’t admit this to everybody. But I’ve only read a page or two of it myself. That goes for a lot of these old books. Some of the very finest books are too hard to read, but I still like to have them and to lay hands on them now and then. For good luck. Do you know what a talisman is? A book can be like that, if you ask me. You don’t have to read it. ’Tis a talisman.”

He went on to tell me he didn’t think all books were equally valuable.

“Now, these are useful books,” he said, looking around his cabin. “So far as I’m concerned, no book’s worth reading that doesn’t offer information of practical use to the reader. What kind of books do you like, Andy?”

I said I liked novels best. He shook his head at that and his eyebrows lowered.

“Sure now, too many people try and live their lives as though they were characters in a novel. They can’t believe it when the plot goes against them. When you’re older, you’ll see what I mean, Andy. You’ll hardly meet a woman who doesn’t believe she’s a character in the Beauty and the Beast story. Of course, ’tisn’t all that bad for the man. No matter what he does, she’ll never be convinced that her Beast is nothing but a Beast.”

He held up the Morologus again.

“Then again, you can’t always trust books that aren’t novels. Now take Morologus. I’m a bit suspicious of him. I think maybe he wanted the world to be a magic place. He believed in a thing called the Eternal Cycle. It means people don’t just have one life—they live over and over and over again. Now who wouldn’t want to believe in that, eh?”

I agreed with him.

“Although, I must admit he says it’s not all roses,” Harry said. “There’s something called the Second Self—that’s your double. Somewhere in the Eternal Cycle, every human being has a double. It’s possible to run into your double in one of your many lives.”

“What happens then?” I said.

“Well, I’m not sure of the details,” Harry said. “But according to Morologus, that’s the worst thing that could happen to you. The two of you cancel each other out, and that’s the end of the Eternal Cycle for both of you.” He laughed. “So just you watch out, Andy. Make sure you always steer clear of your Second Self.”

One afternoon after lunch, I was down in his cabin waiting for him to finish in the galley. I was rummaging through his books looking for something that might interest me. In the middle of a heap under the porthole I saw an old one with a stained leather cover. On the spine, all I
could make out were the words “Blast” and “Monstrous.” That attracted my attention. I opened the book, and saw the complete title—a very long title:

Harry Greene came in just as I was looking at it and I quickly dropped the book back on the heap. I should have asked him what it was about, but I didn’t. I thought it was the most frightening title of a book I’d ever seen.

I was becoming quite accustomed to the motion of the
Cumnock
. I made myself intimate with the ship’s secret places: with the engine room, where the noise was so thick I felt I could touch it; with the stinking cathedral of the main cargo hold; with the crew’s lounge, where I often watched the sailors play dominoes. They looked like very old men to me.

“Why are they all so old?” I asked Harry one night after dinner, when we were standing at the rail looking out on the dark water. Funny, I didn’t think of him as an old man even though—what with his beard and long grey hair—he looked just as old as the others. In fact, he must only have been in his mid-forties. But for a boy my age, that was ancient.

Sometimes, he’d sniff the breeze, which I took to be a sailor’s habit. He did so now, then he answered.

“They weren’t always like that. God’s oars! No, not at all.” He laughed sternly. “Sailors needed to be young and strong. Imagine having an old man with stiff muscles next to you when you were clinging to a spar in a storm off Cape Horn.” He shook his head. “But now there’s no rigging to climb, and mechanical winches do all the heavy work.” The
winches were located near each of the hatchways; they looked like gallows in the dusk. “They’re just like old workers anywhere. They’re serving out their time, waiting to be pensioned off. Most of my shipmates can hardly wait for the day. They hate the life at sea.”

That surprised me.

“Why do they hate it?” I said.

“Oh well now,” he said. “I think ’tis because every port they sail into reminds them of being young. When they used to do all the crazy things young sailors do. Now their bodies won’t let them any more.” He laughed. “Of course, some of them have been old men all their lives, and all that’s happened is that their bodies have caught up to them.”

He said this as though he despised such men. I kept quiet. I hoped he didn’t think of me as old before my time.

T
HE
C
UMNOCK SAILED
further and further south. The skies were still overcast but the air was uncomfortably warm and moist in a way I’d never felt before. At one point, two hundred miles off the coast of Africa, a sweet, rotten smell drifted out to us on the wind. “Jungle,” I heard one of the crew say. In the morning, a school of dolphins appeared and swam alongside for an hour.

The smell of land seemed to entice the other passenger, the old woman, out onto the deck. One evening, around dusk, I was standing at the rail waiting for Harry when she came out and stood just a yard away from me at the rail,
looking in the direction of those distant jungles. I hadn’t seen her since that first night, for she had all her meals served in her cabin.

She wasn’t wearing the long dress any more. Now she had a grey trilby hat on her head, and she wore a man’s blue pinstriped suit with old sweat stains under the arm-pits. What a gaunt woman she was, with a turkey neck that was brown and wrinkled, and a hooked nose. She stood silently at the rail for perhaps five minutes. Without really knowing why, I inched my elbow along the rail towards her. Perhaps because I was lonely.

She stared straight ahead, but when my elbow was close to hers, she made a low growling noise.

I quickly backed away and the growling stopped. She stood a while longer, then, without looking at me, she went back to her cabin.

When Harry came out of the galley to throw a bucket of slops in the water I asked him about the woman.

“She must be very old,” I said. “Her face is so wrinkled.”

“’Tis true,” he said. “Her life story’s written there for anyone to read.” His own face was wrinkled, especially round the eyes. I’d often tried to disentangle the lines, but they were too intricate for me, and the beard covered the rest of his face.

He saw the way I was looking at him.

“Even the face of the ocean isn’t easy to read,” he said. “An experienced sailor can figure out what it means a lot of the time. And sometimes he’ll get it completely wrong.”

He threw the bucket of slops overboard, and immediately sharks began squabbling over them. In the dusk, we could see a spreading pink stain—they were biting each other as well as the scraps.

“God’s oars!” Harry said. “Look at them. I surely wouldn’t like to fall overboard at this time of the night.”

He put down the bucket and began to talk about the old woman.

“She doesn’t speak much English, but I take my time, and I find things out when I take her meals down to her. She’s a widow and she’s going back home to San Marco Island. She and her husband left there forty years ago and went to live in America. The island used to be a beautiful place, cut off from all the rest of the world. The reefs were full of fish, and the people were the kindest you could meet.” He shook his head. “Forty years ago! She has no idea how much San Marco’s changed since then. During the War, ’twas used as an air base, and the military stayed till not long ago. The reef’s been poisoned with bunker oil, so there’s no more fishing. The town’s as bad as any slum I’ve ever seen, what with violence and drugs. When we call in there, our crew’s afraid to go ashore. ’Tis a terrible shame.”

Some sharks were still trailing the
Cumnock
, their blunt snouts raised towards us looking for more slops.

“I don’t suppose,” Harry Greene said, “when the widow was a young girl she appreciated how good a place San Marco was. Maybe if you’re brought up in Paradise, you find it kind of dull. Eh, Andy? Paradise is always somewhere else. She thought it was in America.”

The sharks dissolved into the darkening ocean.

“During all those years she was away,” Harry said, “she believed San Marco was the way she remembered it. She didn’t see it going down the drain.”

“Why is she going back?” I asked.

“Ah, well. Her husband’s dead. Her two sons are married and don’t even invite her for a visit. And now she’s old enough to appreciate what she didn’t when she was young—now that it doesn’t exist any more.”

“Why is she wearing the funny clothes?”

“They’re her husband’s,” Harry said. “It used to be the custom on San Marco when a man died for his widow to wear his clothes for a while. The islanders stopped doing that kind of thing a long time ago.”

After telling me all this, Harry put a hand on my shoulder and his eyebrows lowered as they did when he was most serious.

“You know what, Andy? I’m going to make you a promise right now. If there is a Paradise on this earth, and if I ever find it, I’ll let you know. It’s a bit late for me. But maybe you can go there and live happily ever after. Right?”

The night after that, a very curious thing happened. Harry and I had gone for a stroll forward. Again, it was around dusk. We stopped at the rail amidships to talk. He liked it there, because it was well away from the crew, and we might have been alone on a little island in the middle of the ocean.

On this particular evening, we saw a disturbance in the sea about half a mile to port. As it came nearer, clearly visible in the dark water, we could make out a huge yellow shape. It was coming, at speed, directly at the port side of the
Cumnock
. We thought it might veer away when it became aware of us, but it didn’t. This yellow creature, which was as big as the ship, and looked as ponderous, continued straight at us. Both Harry and I grabbed the rail, ready for the impact. But just as it was about to hit, the creature suddenly split into two distinctive forms, one green, one orange, and went round the ship, fore and aft. The
Cumnock
trembled gently from end to end, like a cat being stroked.

“Come on,” Harry said.

We ran across the deck to the starboard rail. There we saw the green and the orange masses recombine into that
great yellow shape and continue on its way towards the western horizon and the blood-red sun.

“God’s rope!” said Harry. “I thought for a minute it was going to sink us, whatever it was. Isn’t it strange how something that looks like a monster is really quite harmless.” He looked at me sternly. “You just remember that, Andy. ’Tis often the most innocent-looking creatures that are the real monsters.”

When we got back to the stern, some of the crew members who had come out on deck to see what had disturbed the ship were still staring in the direction the shape had disappeared in. They seemed scared, and relieved that it was gone.

On another one of those inseparable days, we were sitting in Harry Greene’s cabin. The weather was rough and the books were stirring on the floor. His chair was like a reef in a sea of books. I sat on his bunk. We were talking about this and that, when all at once his bushy eyebrows lowered.

“Now, Mister Andrew Halfnight. Let’s get down to business. Who exactly are you? Where do you come from? And why are you on this ship?”

This was the first time he’d ever asked me these questions. He was a man who preferred to talk about himself and his interests, and I understood that and accepted it. I was flattered that he should ask, so I answered all his questions as well as I could. In fact, I told him just about everything about myself.

That was the first time I ever put my life story into words. I realized then what a strange procedure that was—how different from the actual experiences themselves. Some of the experiences hadn’t been at all pleasant, but the telling of them was.

At the end of it all, Harry shook his head.

“God’s oars!” he said. “So you’re from Stroven. What a coincidence.” Then he said: “I’ve known sailors who came from Stroven. And Muirton, too, and Carrick, and some of those other hill towns. They were good shipmates.”

Then he spoke very softly, as though it was a great secret.

“And let me tell you something else. I’ve visited Stroven myself.”

Before I had a chance to ask him when or why he’d been there, he began to speak in a very formal voice, his eyebrows bristling.

“Andrew Halfnight,” he said. “You’re a good lad. Thank you for telling me about yourself.”

Then, as though we’d reached the conclusion of some ritual together, he reached out across the drifting books and shook my hand.

“May life be good to you.”

I
T WAS HARD TO
distinguish day from day, and the ocean had no milestones. But if I don’t remember the exact order of the things that happened on the voyage, I do remember the things themselves. On one of those indistinguishable evenings in Harry Greene’s cabin, he asked me more about my stay in Glasgow before embarking.

“You said you’d spent some nights in the Hochmagandie,” he said. “Why did you go there?”

“Doctor Giffen arranged it,” I said. “The clerk put me in the room he stays in when he’s in town.”

He asked me to describe Doctor Giffen, and I did.

“Sure now, I know the man,” he said. “A tidy little squirrel of a man.”

I smiled at his description.