To the Ends of the Earth (58 page)

I glanced up at the sails. Those that had escaped destruction were full and Benét’s men were working the yards round. There was wind—enough for steerage way, enough even for security. The ranges themselves as though the monstrous billow which had broken round us like some marine cataclysm had been the peak of all, a seventh wave beyond all seventh waves, was being
succeeded
by smaller ones.

I could hear Charles speaking thickly, as though his mouth had been damaged.

“Wind’s moving on to the quarter, sir. We could set stays’ls.”

The captain stared over the quarter, then back at Charles.

“Are you fit?”

Charles laboured to his feet.

“Think so, sir.”

“Stays’ls then—” The captain turned to me and seemed about to speak but changed his mind and stumped to the forrard rail.

It took that day which was dawning and the next one too for Captain Anderson and his officers to restore some order and routine to the vessel. For one thing, getting the pervasive film of oil off required the whole crew, the
soldiers
and the emigrants!

The stuff was everywhere. It even reached some fifteen feet up the mainmast, or so Bates assured us. In the lobby it was smeared to a height of three feet along the bulkheads and doors through which it had effected some degree of entry to the cabins. Of sheer necessity the panic among the people which had gone near to drowning us all was ignored tacitly, though I am sure the captain was enraged at the
situation
in which he found himself. To abandon the post of duty was of course a fault which should have been
punished
with the utmost severity. I do not say this in
indignation
but from a cool sense of what some other ship might expect of her people with such an example before them! I repeat, there is no doubt that men abandoned their duty and tried to hide from the sea. As Charles once said, “Men, like cables, have each their breaking strain.” Next to open mutiny the crew had committed the blackest crime in a seaman’s calendar.

Yet what was to be done about it? A minority, even one possessing the natural authority of office, cannot
guarantee
obedience in making the body politic punish itself! No one could deny they had been sorely tried. Apart from the weather, our outrageously lengthy voyage meant that the food was scanty and the drink almost gone. We had little firing left, so that hot water was a luxury no longer obtainable even for the ladies. The ship was labouring.
The pumping, though not constant as in the heaviest weather, was nevertheless a sore trial to men becoming weak through exposure, toil and inadequate nourishment.

However, the thing was done. The ship was scrubbed, squeegeed, mopped and dried until at least a man with a seaman’s sense of balance could keep his footing. Those sails which could be mended were attended to and others spread. Whatever else the ship lacked she was well provided with rope and canvas. A great deal of fishing went on in the easier weather which we then experienced though
nothing
that was caught came my way. Fish do not appear to be tempted to the line from a large vessel. Perhaps rumour of that strangest of fish, Man, had descended among the finny tribes! We did, however, see whales often enough and Mr Benét was said to have suggested a number of ways of killing them. The crew, though most crafts and skills were represented among them—particularly after they had heard his mad idea for a harpoon with an explosive charge of gunpowder attached to it—were not eager.

My own suggestion of using our great guns and firing, as near as we could, a broadside at the monsters met with no better success. We settled therefore to our short commons and were only consoled by the thought—the fact—that we were
getting on
. The foremast had passed the severest of trials triumphantly. When the light wind was broad enough on the quarter we spread not just stuns’ls, but stays’ls too—large triangular areas of canvas stretched between the masts rather than on them. For days I believe we never made less than six knots.

The reader who is not a seaman must accept my
apologies
for these lengthy divergences into a detailed account of their craft and skill! The fact is that I miss continually the point I am trying to convey. When your life depends on it there is a pleasure like no other in the movement towards your goal, in the chuckle of cleft water at the forefoot, the
swell of sails, the movement night and day of a mass of cleverly constructed timber which must come close to totalling two thousand tons! The very seamen themselves walked with a more cheerful gait and a readier response to orders. Everyone seemed happy, even the officers—except perhaps Charles. He, I have to say, clung to the idea of a spark of fire burrowing in the shoe under the foremast! During another of those middle watches which I so enjoyed I taxed him with it.

“Confess, Charles. The mast is safe. You are hugging to yourself the thought that Mr Benét might be wrong after all!”

“He cannot always be right. No man can. Since he is wrong in his proposed method of finding our longitude—”

“Wrong?”

“The theory is correct—but do you understand the
difficulty
, the near-impossibility of measuring the angular separation of two heavenly bodies—one of them at least changing shape all the time?”

“I asked the sailing master to explain Mr Benét’s method to me but he would not.”

“It is a question of parallax and so on. It seems to involve the moon, the sun, planets and even the moons of planets—a whole cobweb of measurements—the man is brilliantly mad!”

“Yet he was right before. Do not, I beg of you, Charles, let a habit of dislike blind you to the man’s merits. I cannot endure to see you less than you are! Forgive me—I am now the one to preach.”

“You may do so. My objection to Mr Benét’s method of finding our latitude without reference to chronometers is based on reason not dislike. If the most learned and intellectual minds of our country have abandoned this method it is because the method is inaccurate. Is he mad or am I?”

“Not you, I beg—you are our prop and stay in
informed
common sense!”

“Well. We have a passage at least a hundred miles wide between the few islands of this ocean. Knowing the
latitude
is enough to keep us safely between them. We cannot yet be far enough advanced to risk running on our
objective
before we see it. That day must look after itself.”

Mr Prettiman no longer screamed or roared when the vessel pitched. My simple plan of “turning him end for end” seemed successful. He might be dying but was doing so peacefully. I had tried to avoid Mrs Prettiman since the time when she had—oh, I felt it too deeply to play with the event in Tarpaulin!—when she had given her opinion of me in the measured tones of a judgement from the bench. Once, she came into the saloon when I was there but left before I had time even to get on my feet. Once, I detected her running
downhill
across the lobby at a roll of the ship, and after I had seen her arrive safely at the rail between the doors of the cabins I averted my face and passed on. She still kept to her “seaman’s rig” and I could not but applaud her decision. Once you have accustomed yourself to a sight sufficiently shocking at first, there is little to
disconcert
you in the sight of a lady wearing “trowsers”. Indeed, if you consider the possible inconveniences and
revelations
which the costume proper to a lady on shore might
occasion
in a pitching, tossing, reeling vessel, trowsers, or a cleverly made female form of them, might well be thought more appropriate than skirts. What is more, they are undoubtedly safer, since a lady has no longer to put
propriety
not to say decency at odds with safety and prefer death to immodesty like the girl in the French story.

All the same, I was fated to confront her again and in
circumstances
which were reminiscent—though she was devoting herself to the sick man—of high comedy. I had been walking, or rather staggering, in the waist, for the
weather now seemed set so fair that where possible I had ceased to make use of the lifelines. At times the dark and soaked deck wore the dirty white of salt beneath which the ancient wood showed mouldy splinters and here and there oakum pushing through the tar of the seams like hair. It was not, one might have thought, a place in which the human mind could contemplate anything other than its latter end. Yet as far as I could see no one did so. We were inured to danger, some of us made indifferent to it, some of us—Bowles for example—in a state of constant dread, some of us coarsened by it and some finding in it a source of exhilaration, like young Mr Taylor who sang, whistled and laughed in a way that the more sullen of us, such as I myself, found positively demented. One, at least, appeared to be above such trivial matters as death. It was Mr Benét. As I staggered back from a brief word or two with Mr East at the break of the fo’castle I saw him coming off watch, down the ladder from the quarterdeck. He had a paper in his hand, his eyes which were wide open looked clean out of our dirty world, and there was an ecstatic smile on his face. He ignored me as I approached, and rushed into the lobby. The foremast being safe as far as anyone knew, I thought he had turned his attention to his next craze, the foolish scheme of finding our position without the use of a chronometer. It was a scheme I thought I might well understand and hurried after him. I reached the door of the lobby just as he had knocked on Mrs Prettiman’s door and evidently been answered, for he opened the door wide, stepped into the cabin and
pulled the door to behind him!
This was too much. If
he
had no care for the lady’s
reputation
,
I
had! Though it was “uphill” for the nonce, I was three-quarters of the way to that door and so careless through outrage that a buck of the ship flung me face down on the slippery deck. I was stunned, I think, for a moment, for I was no more than on my knees when the door of her
cabin burst open and with a positive clatter of his tarpaulin garments, Benét came staggering out. He had no paper in his hand. The door slammed shut behind him. The next roll to the one which had floored me sent him flying
downhill
in a most unseamanlike manner across the lobby. He was no longer smiling. He struck the great cylinder of the mizzenmast and stood rocking above me. Then with speechless care he went to the ladder down to the wardroom and disappeared.

But I had seen! On his left cheek there was a white patch, and in the few moments during which he remained in view, with the deepest satisfaction and indignation I saw that patch turn to the pink shape of a lady’s hand!

However, my duty was plain. Mr Prettiman was in no state to defend the lady. The offer must come from me. I went to the door and tapped. After a few moments it was—I will not say “pushed” but flung open.

The fact is I was intimidated by that lady! Was it
perhaps
her years? I do not think so. She stood there now and glared at me as if I had been Benét. As the voyage
lengthened
towards a year, her own years had become less and less obvious to the casual beholder. True, the sun and wind had darkened her features to a uniform brown which was more appropriate to the peasantry than a lady from the Close! Her hair, which she commonly bound up with a scarf instead of the bonnet she had once thought suitable to her condition, had a habit of escaping—for it was abundant. It tended to catch the eye irritatingly. It hung now about her face and shoulders. Her person was otherwise quite unexceptionable.

I had no time to offer my services. The crimson of
indignation
suffused her cheeks despite the attentions of the sun.

“Are all the young men in this ship stark, staring mad?”

My mouth was open to reply when we were both interrupted.

“Letitia!”

It was Mr Prettiman calling from his bed of pain—and now repeating the call in tones not much like those of an invalid.

“Letty!”

Mrs Prettiman closed the door behind her and opened that of her husband’s cabin. She spoke over her shoulder.

“Please remain, Mr Talbot. I wish to speak with you.”

She shut the door behind her. So there I stood, and just as a schoolboy who does not know whether he is to run an errand or be punished for a misdeed but fears the worst, and he cocks his ear to find (if he can) a clue to his fate but is not able to translate the sounds that come so faintly to him from an adult world, so nor could I! For the first human sound I heard was surely that of laughter! He—a dying man! She—his devoted wife! I—

His cabin door opened and she came out. I got the door of her cabin open and held it for her. She passed inside and stood by the canvas washbasin staring into her right hand. With an exclamation of distaste she seized a scrap of
cambric
and scrubbed the palm vigorously. She caught my eye, stopped, then flounced herself down in the canvas chair in a way which had she been a girl I would have called pettish. She put some of her hair back with her right hand but quite without effect, for it fell forward again.

“
Fudge!
”

She caught my eye again and had the grace to blush a little.

“Oh, come in, Mr Talbot. Kindly latch the door back against the stop. The proprieties must be observed. We must not sully your reputation—”

I suppose my jaw had dropped, for she seemed irritated.

“Sit on the bunk, for Heaven’s sake! I cannot be for ever staring up at the ceiling.”

I did so.

“If you please, Mrs Prettiman, I had wished to offer my services. Believing Mr Prettiman incapacitated by his injuries—”

“Oh, he is, he is!”

“By good fortune I saw Mr Benét force his attentions—”

“Say no more, sir.”

“Force his ridiculous verses on you—”

Mrs Prettiman sighed.

“That is the trouble, Mr Talbot. They are not ridiculous except in the article of addressing me as ‘Egeria’. He is a talented young man. Mr Prettiman and I desire that the affair should be forgotten. Yet I blame myself in part. I am not usually an unreasonable woman, but to be addressed in such terms, to have my hand seized in such a manner—and all from a man young enough to be—a younger brother, Mr Talbot.”

“He deserves to be flogged!”

“There shall be no violence, sir. Once and for all, I will not have it!”

“He should be ashamed—”

“
I
am ashamed. I am not accustomed to such feelings. I am happy to say I have not merited them.”

I opened my mouth to agree—then shut it again. She went on.

“The extraordinary events—the fearful weather—the queue of simple souls doing Mr Prettiman reverence—your well-meant but clumsy action—”

She paused for a while.

“Pray continue.”

“You see, he is not dying! Since you stretched his poor torn leg the swelling has subsided. Perhaps he will not walk again. He is not out of danger. But the pain is becoming bearable. How can I be ashamed that he is recovering? I am delighted and ashamed! He too has owned that, in some ways, if it were not for the cessation of pain he would
himself be ashamed of his recovery! He and I, you see—we are rendered
conscious
by the situation. This is all mad, you see. But true!”