To the Ends of the Earth (38 page)

I woke with the faintest trace of light through my louvre and lay for a while in a state of surprise at my restoration. I supposed that I had, as they say of sickness, “turned the corner”, and that my concussion had run its course. I felt full of energy and determination. I even sat, half-dressed, at this flap and wrote a whole candle’s worth of record—of Mr Askew, Mr Benét, Charles, Miss Granham and Mr Gibbs! By that time there was as much daylight about as ever did reach our sordid quarters and I put out the guttering candle. The effect of my restoration was still with me; but I cannot say that when I got myself dressed and oilskinned and went cautiously out for a breath of the open that there was much in sight to please a man now heartily tired of salt water! Too much of it flew
everywhere
. I looked up to discover if Captain Anderson was stumping up and down the weather-side of the
quarterdeck
but he was not to be seen. Instead of that, an oil-clad figure waved to me from the forrard rail of it. A faint voice came through the wind.

“Hullo there!”

It was Lieutenant Benét.

“Why hullo! A nasty morning!”

“I will be with you directly.”

Cumbershum emerged from the bowels of the ship. He grunted at me and I grunted back. It is all that is
necessary
with the man. He ascended to the quarterdeck and the ship’s bell struck eight times. The ceremony was brief. The gentlemen made to raise their hats but wore sou’westers secured by what they call, of course, “chin stays”. Their action was therefore purely symbolic, a
raising
of the right hand to the level of the eyebrow. The men at the wheel presented the course to the new
quartermasters
. Benét came down the ladder. He held the forrard rail with both hands and leaned over.

“Come up, sir.”

“You are cheerful this morning, Mr Benét.”

“It is an appearance perhaps.”

“Separation as I am beginning to find out—”

“I understand you. Wilson! Keep your eye on the bloody luff! Well, Mr Talbot, I spent the whole watch occupied with the two lines I quoted to you and have improved them materially. ‘
Essential Beauty lovelier than a woman, too fair of form and feature to be human
—’ Is that not a gain?”

“I am no poet.”

“How do you know, sir? I am told you wept when Mrs East sang—”

“Good God! They were tears, idle tears and where in heaven or hell they came from—or what—besides, I had been cracked over the head!”

“My dear Mr Talbot. Once faced with the necessity of communicating with the most sensitive, most delicate of creatures—only poetry will make that connection. It is their language, sir. Theirs is the language of the future. Women have dawned. Once they have understood what syllables, rather than prose, should fall from those lips, women will rise in splendour like the sun!”

“You amaze me, Mr Benét.”

“Prose? It is the speech of merchants to each other, sir, the language of war, commerce, husbandry.”

“But poetry—”

“Prose will do for persuading men, sir. Why, only yesterday I was able to persuade the captain that a small alteration of course would be beneficial. Now had I
represented
in verse to the captain that he was wrong—” 

“I am surprised you are still alive.”

“No—no! Do you not see that our motion is easier?”

“I had thought my ability to keep my feet and in fact to be cheerful was the result of my complete recovery.”

“We have come a point off the wind and the increase in our speed, however slight, compensates for the extra distance. But the absence of the Beloved Object—”

“You refer to Lady Somerset.”

Lieutenant Benét took off his sou’wester and shook out the golden fleece.

“Who else?”

“I did suppose,” said I, laughing, “that you might have had Another in mind—”

“There is no other!”

“In your eyes, no, but to mine—”

Lieutenant Benét shook his head, smiling kindly.

“There cannot be.”

“It did occur to me that perhaps you had an
opportunity
of forming some opinion on the character of Miss Chumley.”

“She has none.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She can have none. She is a schoolgirl, Mr Talbot.”

“Miss Chumley—”

“I have no opinion of schoolgirls. It is useless to look to them for sympathy or understanding or anything. They are blown by every wind, sir. Why, my own sisters would follow any redcoat if dear Mama did not have an eye to them.”

“Miss Chumley is no longer a schoolgirl!”

“She is pretty, I grant you, amiable with a trace of wit—”

“A trace!”

“Malleable—”

“Mr Benét!”

“Why—what is the matter?” 

“Lieutenant Deverel is aboard
Alcyone
—he is notorious—”

“A cockerel, Mr Talbot. I did not like the man even the little I saw of him.”

“Mr Askew told me, Mr Askew said that Handsome Jack—”

“At least I must thank him for allowing me to choose this melancholy exile!”

“But, Mr Benét—forgive me. Exile! You seem a happy man! Your accustomed attitude, your very facial
expression
—it is sunny, sir!”

Lieutenant Benét looked astonished and revolted. He put on his sou’wester again.

“You cannot be serious, Mr Talbot. I happy!”

“Forgive me!”

“Were I small-minded enough, Mr Talbot, I should at this very moment envy your condition! You love Miss Chumley, do you not?”

“Indeed.”

Mr Benét’s face was wet but it was with rain or seaspray not tears. His golden locks beat about his brow. The
spyglass
under his arm seemed so mechanically and
professionally
a part of his character that when he suddenly whipped it out and ran back up to the quarterdeck, it was as if he had extended another limb which until then had been folded in like the leg of an insect. He levelled it at the horizon. He spoke to Cumbershum and for a while the two gentlemen aimed their parallel glasses, all the while contriving to remain upright in a way I found admirable. Mr Benét shut up his glass and came back to me at the run.

“A whaler, Mr Talbot. She would avoid us even if we made signals of distress.”

“But, Mr Benét—you said ‘My condition’?”

“Why, the letter, sir. I was to put it into your hand but you were indisposed. I gave it to your servant.” 

“Wheeler!”

“No—no. The other one. You slab-sided son of a sea cook! Keep your eyes on the horizon or I’ll have the skin off your back! You never reported that sail!”

This was with a roar much like Captain Anderson’s but it issued from the throat of Lieutenant Benét. He had his head back and was addressing the top of what was left of our mainmast. Then he turned and spoke to me in his ordinary voice.

“The man is a half-wit. We shall talk together again, I hope.”

He raised his hand in salute and then was racing away down the ladder before I had time to return it. I myself fairly ran to the lobby and shouted for Phillips. He came and when I demanded the letter he struck his head with his open palm and rebuked that organ for being, as he said, a sieve. But I had been sick and he had been this and that—I heard him with impatience and finally sent him off to find the missive which he passed some considerable time in finding. This enabled me to anticipate what impossible treasures it might hold! There would be a long letter from Miss Chumley, written after the ball in a sleepless night! In a confession of attachment, franker than mine, she would have given me her journal. It would be franker also than mine—which had been limited by a sense of masculine decorum! Here was a most affecting account of the death of her dearest mama! A pressed flower from the gardens of Wilton House, an endearingly inadequate sketch of her music master, that old, old man! Oh, the optimism and phantasy of a young man in love! The state heats every
faculty
like water in a saucepan on a fire! But for all the time he took, Phillips brought the missive to me too soon and it was small, thin, expensive and so heavily scented I recognized it at once with a downward lurch of the heart for what it was. But then, how could I have been so foolish as to expect 
anything more than a note from Mr Benét’s “most adorable of women”?

I hurried into my hutch.

“Get out, Wheeler! Get out!”

I unfolded the paper and a wave of scent took me by the throat. I had to blink water out of my eyes.

“Lady Somerset presents her compliments to Mr Edmund FitzH. Talbot. Lady Somerset consents to a correspondence between him and Miss Cholmondeley subject to Lady Somerset’s supervision. She assumes, nor would Mr Talbot wish her to do more, that the exchange of missives is one between acquaintances and may be broken off or suspended at the wish of either party.”

Did the woman think I would
not
write, permission or no? But it was something—and then! Before me on the bunk lay another smaller piece of paper. It had been, for sure, folded into the larger missive. It had no scent but what it had acquired by contact with the more expensive wrapping. With a folly and ardour of which I should never have suspected myself, I pressed it, unread, to my lips. I unfolded it with trembling fingers. What man or woman whose heart has ever beaten more quickly at the sight of such a communication will not understand my joy?

A young person will remember for the rest of her life the meeting of two ships and prays that one day they may put down their ankers in the same harbour
.

Foolish rapture, even to tears! I will not repeat the generous and copious and spontaneous promises that sprang unbidden to my lips at the thought of that dear, distant Vision! Those who run may read. This must be the crown of life and I would not have it otherwise!

A
young person will remember for the rest of her life
—She had written—perhaps in tears—there were marks too on the back of the paper. It had lain on another while that 
was still wet and unsanded. The words were none of them plainly to be read for they were smudged and backwards at that. There were blots too. It gave me a most complete and devout sense of nearness to her. What would I have not given to kiss the ink from her slender fingers? I seized my mirror, angled it and peered at what had been written. The mind had to restore a whole word from one letter and a smudge, divine the sense with a passion rare in
scholarship
! At last I made out what was surely the first line. “
Her faults are legion and her virtues small
.” (I made the word “virtue” to be plural myself. I did not think that Miss Chumley would have written anything so improper for her sex and years as a comment on a lady’s “virtue”.)

Here the manuscript became quite illegible. But it was an enchanting fragment from that hand. I swear my first opinion was that Pope himself could have done no better than these gently satiric lines! I could hear her very voice and see her smile! She, like Lieutenant Benét, was an addict of poetry. Had he not said that the Muse is the shortest way to the female heart—or words to that effect?

I do not know if I have the boldness to describe what now occurred. I have always, and alas rightly, thought myself to be a prose person! Yet now and with no more ado, but with an ear-tingling sense almost of shame I entered those lists myself! Or tried to! It was the nearest way to her heart and what else could I do in a ship lost amid this waste of miles, this ocean of time, this separation from all that makes life—tolerable I would say, had I not now this overwhelming reason for living! for living. I lay my hand on my heart and declare that the very 
movement of the planks beneath my feet, evidence of our slow peril, begot in me no more than an impatience with such trivialities as stood between me and what I desired.

But my only experience of the Muse as they would call it was in Latin and Greek, elegiacs, fivers and sixers as we used to say. However—I blush confoundedly at the
memory
but the truth will be out—and even now I had some confused sense that it was to you, my dear, my clever Angel, that this journal should be written! I got out of my oilskins, sat at my flap, kissed her missive a few times and set out—let me make the confession—to write an Ode to the Beloved! Oh, indeed, Mr Smiles is right! We are all madmen! It is true—I am a witness to it that not poetry but the attempt at poetry is a substitute however poor for the presence of the beloved. I was above myself and saw things plainly as from a mountain top. Whether it be Milton’s God or Shakespeare’s Dark Lady and even darker Gentleman—whether it be Lesbia or Amaryllis or devil take it, Corydon, the Object lifts the mind to a sphere where only the irrational in language makes any sense. So then I, half-ashamed, with feelings of utter folly yet real need, stared at the blank white paper as if I might find at once relief and achievement there. I examine it now with its poor traces of real passion—those blots and crossings-out, those emendations, alternatives, laborious markings-down of shorts and longs, suggestions to myself or to her—these in their incompetence for those who understand were my real poetry of passion!

Candida
for “whiteness”. Indeed, an air of whiteness surrounded her, enhaloed her, the fit surround for an innocent girl whose beauty is known to others but not yet to herself!
Candida
, oh, nothing whiter—
Candidior lunâ
, therefore, a light to me,
mea lux—vector
is a passenger no, no, nothing so dusty, so drear,
puella, nympha, virgo
, is there not
nymphe
too? 

So suddenly from nowhere I had my hexameter!

But is not
nymphe
a bride? It makes no matter. Then—
Pelle mihî nimbos et mare mulce precor
—the pentameter came all with a rush but I did not like it, there was no smoothness, all was rough and dull.
Marmora blanditiis
—better; and so: