To the Ends of the Earth (51 page)

“That will have to wait, I am afraid.”

“I will study it ashore. But then I should have no
horizon
. Well—I will ride down to the sea.”

“You need not. You may take altitudes by measuring the angle between, let us say, the sun and its reflection in a bath of mercury.”

“And halve the angle! How ingenious!”

“You saw all that at once?”

“Why, it is obvious.”

“Young Willis does not find that sort of thing obvious, nor young Taylor, come to that.”

“Mr Benét, of course, would hardly need a sextant. He would use dead reckoning or build a mercury bath into it.”

“There is nothing wrong with dead reckoning if you know what you are doing. Mr Bellows could talk like a book when he wanted to and he had a sentence for that. He made me write it down in my log and learn it by heart. ‘More seamen have been surprised by the accuracy of dead reckoning than have ever been disconcerted by its imprecision.’”

“He could indeed speak like a book!”

We were interrupted by the necessity of having the log cast. This was done every hour and it became my duty solemnly to lift the canvas cover of the traverse board and write in the result. But now I took great interest in the
process, though it soon became so habitual as to be
unnoticeable
. It was followed this first time by a long silence while neither of us felt any need to speak. Occasionally wide clouds obscured the moon but they were fleecy round the edges and gave us almost as much light as from the round of moon itself. I climbed to the poop and stared at our gentle wake. That “body”, which I had seen so
laboriously
carried up to the quarterdeck, now lay triced to the rail on the starboard quarter. A rope was attached to it—two ropes, in fact: and they led over the taffrail and down under the stern. Of course! One was the rope in the office of necessity—the other opposite—it was very mysterious. Suddenly our gentle wake burst into a splendour of
diamonds
. The moon was gliding out from the farther edge of a cloud. I turned back and went down to the
quarterdeck
where Charles stood by the stairs up to the poop. I was about to question him when I was interrupted.

“Charles—what was that?”

“It is the duty watch.”

“Singing?”

They were visible, not sheltering now under the rail or to leeward of a mast but grouped at the capstan on the fo’castle. They were leaning against it. The music—for such it was, harmony and all—drifted about us, gentle as the wake and the wind, magic as the moonlight. I went
forward
to the rail of the quarterdeck and leaned over it,
listening
. As if they had seen and were glad of an audience they seemed to turn—or at least I had the impression of many moon-blanched faces looking my way—and the volume of sound increased.

“What is it, Edmund?”

Charles had come and stood beside me.

“The music!”

“Just the duty watch.”

They were silent. Someone had emerged from the
fo’castle and was speaking to them. Evidently the concert was over. But there were still the moon and stars and the glitter of the sea.

“How awesome to think that we actually use all that up there—make use of the stars and refer to the sun as habitually as to a signpost!”

Charles spoke hesitantly and, it seemed, a little shyly.

“No man can contemplate it without being put in mind of his Maker.”

A cloud was swallowing the moon again. The water and the ship were dulled.

“The concept is naïve surely. When I consult my repeater I do not
invariably
think of the man who made it!”

He looked round at me. He wore a mask of moonlight as I suppose I did. He spoke with due solemnity.

“When I consider the heavens the work of Thy fingers, the moon and stars which Thou hast ordained—”

“But that is poetry! Milton could do no better!”

“The psalms are prose, surely.”

“Yet why should putting something into poetry make it truer than if it was in figures, as in your Mr Norie?”

“You are too clever for me, Edmund.”

“I did not mean to be—oh, what a gross impertinence! Forgive me!”

“Was I insulted? I did not feel it. There is a difference between the sky and a pocket watch.”

“Yes, yes. That is true. I was making a debating point which I suppose is one of the more detestable results of a gentleman’s education. Poetry itself is a mystery—so is prose—so is everything—I used to think of poetry as an entertainment. It is more, far more. Oh, Charles, Charles, I am so deeply, so desperately, so deeply, deeply in love!”

Charles Summers was silent. The masks of
moonlight
which were hiding our faces made the night-time confession inevitable. It had burst from me without my volition.

“You say nothing, Charles. Have I annoyed you? I beg your pardon for mixing what must seem a trivial matter in all this going on round us—mixing it too into talk of the religion which is your deepest concern. In fact I do not know why you should be so kind as to listen to me. But so you are.”

The first lieutenant went to the wheel and talked with the men there. He stared long into the binnacle. I
wondered
if anything was wrong, but after a few minutes he came back to me slowly.

“It is the young lady you met aboard
Alcyone
.”

“Who else could it be?”

He seemed to brood. Then—

“Who else indeed? I have no doubt she is as virtuous as lovely—”

“Do not make virtue sound so elderly! But is it to be joy or wormwood?”

“I do not understand.”

“A certain person engaged in, in fornication with a
certain
woman—She, Marion Chumley, stood guard, must have consented, must have seen, must have been a part of—Oh, it squeezes my heart to think of it!”

“You cannot mean—”

“If she took however passive a part she is wholly unlike the person I saw, met, talked with. And on top of that I am bound for Sydney Cove and she for Calcutta! The world
could hardly thrust people farther apart. You cannot know what it is like.”

“I know the young lady, at all events. I saw her. You remember how, since I do not dance, I elected to take the watch for the period of the entertainment and ball? I saw you dancing together.”

“Well?”

“What do you expect me to say?”

“I do not know.”

“I saw her next day too, early. She had come to the
starboard
quarter of
Alcyone
and was staring through the side of our ship as if she could see what was going on inside. You were inside, unconscious or delirious. She was wondering about you.”

“How do you know?”

“Who else?”

“Benét?”

He made a dismissive gesture.

“Not in a thousand years.”

“Who told you?”

“No one. I know, you see.”

“Oh, you are making up speeches to comfort me!”

There was a smile, as it were, in Charles’s voice.

“This, then, is the young lady ‘perhaps ten or twelve years younger than myself, a lady of family, wealth—’”

“Did I say so? Before I met her it is certainly how I used to think in my nasty, calculating way. You must despise me.”

“No.”

He walked to the rail and stood for a while, looking over the side. At last he came back and leaned against the break of the poop.

“The moon is going down.”

There was singing again from the fo’castle, very soft. I spoke too, but as softly.

“You know, however long I live I shall remember the middle watch. I shall think of it as a kind of—island—out of this world—made of moonlight—a time for confidences when men can say to a—transmuted face what they would never bring out in the daytime.”

He was silent again.

“Think, Charles, had Deverel not slipped below for a drink we should not have lost our topmasts and she would have spent her life in ignorance of me!”

He laughed abruptly.

“You would have been ignorant of each other! There I saw a glimpse of the old ‘Lord Talbot’.”

“Are you puckering up there in the shadow of the poop? But it makes no sense. We might have met conveniently in a drawing room. Instead of which—Will she lapse once more into that dream of girlhood until some other—Oh no, it cannot be!”

“She will not forget you.”

“It is good of you to say so.”

“No. I understand women.”

It made me laugh.

“Do you say so indeed? How can that be? You are a proper old tarry breeks, a son of a gun, a man master of an honourable profession and skilled in the way of a ship!”

“Ships are feminine, you know. But I understand women. I understand their passivity, gentleness, receiving impressions as in wax—most of all their passionate need to give—”

“Miss Granham, Mrs Brocklebank! And are there not bluestockings? This is no character of a female wit!”

He was silent for a while, then spoke heavily enough, as though I had defeated him in argument and dispirited him.

“I suppose not.”

He walked away and presently the quarterdeck was concerned once more with casting the log.

“Five and a half knots, Edmund. Write it in.”

“When I look back on this voyage—if I am alive to do so—I shall think that for all the danger there were compensations.”

“Whatever they were, they have got you through the middle or nearly.”

“Why so brusque?”

But he had turned away and was plainly more interested for the moment in the ship’s affairs than mine. A pipe was shrilling and men were moving here and there. The next watch was falling in just aft of the break of the fo’castle. Mr Smiles, the sailing master, appeared with Mr Tommy Taylor who was yawning like a cat. Smiles and Charles performed their ritual exchange. The duty watch fell out and dispersed to the wheel, the quarterdeck and positions throughout the upper deck. The off-duty watch was now drifting away to disappear into the fo’castle. In the belfry on the fo’castle the ship’s bell rang eight times in four groups of two.

Charles came back to me.

“Well, Mr Midshipman Talbot, you may go off duty until midnight tomorrow.”

“Good night then, or good morning. I shall remember this watch for the rest of my life—fifty years or more!”

He laughed.

“Say that after you have stood a year or two of them!”

But I was right, not he.

So I went off watch, suddenly overcome with
sleepiness
at four o’clock in the morning and yawning like Mr Taylor. I opened the door of my hutch and found that the lantern had burned or blown out. But I seemed still to be in conversation with Charles. I got my oilskins and seaboots off somehow in the moonless hutch, tumbled into
my bunk, struck some eyebolt or other and cursed it
sleepily
. Nothing could keep me from falling into a dreamless sleep.

It was many days before I in my ignorance realized what had happened. Charles in his care of me had taken on the burden of the middle watch partly, perhaps, to relieve the other officers, but mainly, I am convinced, to spare me the dark hours of that dreadful cabin! It was just like his provision of dry clothing for me. The extraordinary fellow, where he felt himself esteemed, responded with such
generosity
, such warm and manly thoughtfulness as I had not experienced since the days of Old Dobbie or even earlier! It was in him, so to say, a pedestrian care which contrived much out of small things. It was a kind of science or study of domestic donation, trifles set aside, saved, little schemes, manoeuvres, which he would not for the world have known to others but which must at last come to be understood by the caring recipient. It was an odd trait in a fighting sailor, I thought—yet not so strange when you think of the greater part of his career as a ship’s husband, who is a man either shopkeeper and agent for the “domestic” care of a ship in port, or the ship’s officer most responsible for and attending to her internal economy!

So I slept and the moon set and the sun came up, though not in my dark hutch. I was positively shaken awake by Phillips. He would not let me go back to sleep but continued to shake me.

“Go away, man. Let me be.”

“Sir! Wake up, sir!”

“What the devil is the matter with you?”

“You got to get up, sir. The captain wants you.”

“What for?”

“They’re getting married this morning.”

A marriage at sea! For sure the idea does at once
summon
a variety of comments and did so in our ship, I believe. Comments! They had been varied enough at the engagement! But now—Had the reader himself received nothing but the merest intelligence of the fact, his first thought might be “Couldn’t they wait?” His next would be the converse, “Oh, so they couldn’t wait!” But the whole ship knew much more than the mere fact. They knew that a man (respected
forrard
!) was dying. His reason for
marrying
could not be one for jesting comment. But aft, opinions on the man I discovered to be neutral or a little on his side. Then again, the lady he was marrying had literally undergone a sea change. Miss Granham, brought up in
circumstances
which some would consider easy, had, by the death of Canon Granham, been forced to school herself into the behaviour and appearance of a governess, no more. Unexpectedly presented with the prospect of an alliance with a man of even easier circumstances than those of a canon of the Church of England, she had divested herself of both the appearance and the behaviour of a governess as quickly as she could. Or am I so certain where the
behaviour
is concerned? I believe she was by nature a woman of great dignity, intelligence and—austerity. She had also, as I was beginning to discover, a certain warmth, as
unexpected
as welcome. Given all this, that she had submitted to the man’s astonishing advances wounded me more than I could understand! I believe she had been the first lady to present me with a proper view of the dignity
possible
to the sex and I was—disappointed. Oh, that young man! However, there could be little about the marriage for rejoicing. It might well call forth those tears which lesser females are ever ready to shed.

I will report what I can of the event. For sure it must be a report like Captain Cook’s, though the participants were
white people rather than black savages, and some of them were gentlefolk. It was as if the whole ship was
determined
to exhibit at least a little of human nature in the raw—its innate superstition, its ceremoniousness, its joy when forced by the necessity of procreation to celebrate the animal in man!

Let me be precise. There is rather more here of the woman than the man. Miss Granham was visited early by Mrs East, Mrs Pike and Mrs Brocklebank. I am told that she had had to be persuaded out of her seaman’s rig, her slops. The whole female section of our company was
determined
that she should be properly dressed for the sacrifice! Yet this was make-believe! The man was dying and—though they did not know it—the sacrifice had already—but that is complicated. In any case there was an outbreak of the warm remark, the
risqué
, even the downright
salacious
, and some drinking to go with it, as is customary on these occasions. Inevitably it was young Mr Tommy Taylor who went far beyond what was proper, even at a wedding. For looking forward to an hypothetical, an impossible honeymoon, he remarked in a voice breathless and split with his usual hyaena laughter—I call it usual, but as the months passed it seemed to me that the boy began to disappear and the “hyaena” become customary—I have lost myself. He remarked, and in the presence of at least one lady, that Miss Granham was about to resemble an admiral’s handrope. When rashly asked what the similarity was, he replied that the lady was about to be “wormed,
parcelled
and served”. In sheer disgust I took it on myself to give him a clout over the head which must have made that organ ring and did, I was glad to see, leave him with his eyes crossed for as much as a minute.

The congregation which assembled in the lobby was
gallant
and pathetic. A procession of emigrants emerged the wrong, the way forbidden to them, up the ladder from the
gundeck to the passenger lobby. They mixed, uninvited, with the passengers—Mr Brocklebank wearing a stock of pink material and divested of his coach cloak! The men wore favours, some, I thought, dating back to the “
entertainment
”. The women had made efforts and were neat in costume if nothing more. Naturally enough, I changed into the appropriate costume. Bowles and Oldmeadow had never been out of it. Little Mr Pike was not to be seen. There was much chattering and laughter.

Now the most extraordinary change occurred, as if “Heaven smiled” on the ceremony! For there came a new noise altogether. The watch on deck was dragging the canvas cover and then the planking off the skylight. The gloom of the lobby was changed so that for a time we were in the same kind of modified daylight as you would find in some ancient village church. I am sure the change caused as many tears as smiles, this reminder of distant places.

Six bells rang in the forenoon watch. The canvas chair was bundled out of Prettiman’s cabin. The noise of
assembly
diminished suddenly. Captain Anderson appeared, glum as ever, if not indeed more so. Benét followed him, carrying under his arm a large brown-covered volume which I supposed rightly to be the ship’s log. The captain wore the rather splendid uniform in which he had dined in
Alcyone
. I had a mental picture of Mr Benét (the image of a flag lieutenant) murmuring to him, “
I think, sir, it would be appropriate if you was to wear your number ones.
” Well, for sure, Benét was wearing his and meditating, it might be, a polite, poetical tribute to the bride. The groom, of course, remained helplessly in his bed. Captain Anderson went into Prettiman’s hutch.

Miss Granham appeared. There was a gasp and a
murmur
, then silence again. Miss Granham wore white! The dress may have been hers, of course I cannot tell. But the veil which concealed her was one which Mrs Brocklebank
had worn to protect her complexion. Of that I am sure, for it had provided a provoking concealment. Behind Miss Granham and from her hutch—how had they managed to cram themselves in?—came Mrs East, Mrs Pike and Mrs Brocklebank. The bride moved the few feet from her hutch to the bridegroom’s with a certain stately grace, not diminished by the fact that she kept a cautious hand near the rail. As she passed, the women curtsied or bobbed, the men bowed or knuckled their foreheads. Miss Granham stepped over the threshold and entered her fiancé’s cabin. Benét stood outside. I and Oldmeadow pushed our way to the door. Benét was contemplating Miss Granham’s back in a kind of trance. I plucked him by the sleeve.